Tomi Ayorinde

Oluwatomi "Tomi" Ayorinde is co-founder and CEO of Timon, a Y Combinator-backed, stablecoin-powered travel payments platform built for Africans who spend, send, and save money while moving across borders. A software engineer who graduated from Covenant University in 2008 and later spent six years at SAP as an integration and business development consultant, Ayorinde previously built CrowdForce — the YC-backed agent banking and merchant distribution network whose flagship product, PayForce, was acquired by FairMoney in 2023. He founded Timon in September 2024 alongside Chizaram Ucheaga, drawing on a 2011 experience in Mannheim, Germany where his GTBank card was declined and he was left stranded without access to his own money. Timon has since grown to over 100,000 users across 16 African countries, secured investment from Alliance (the crypto accelerator), Kaleo Ventures, Microtraction, Openseed, and Algrowithm Angels, and expanded into Kenya.

Ayorinde is a rare second-time African founder whose first company was acquired before he returned to a harder problem. Timon began as a travel wallet; stablecoins were not in the original plan, but user demand for on-chain funding shifted the roadmap such that roughly 70% of all wallet funding on Timon now flows through stablecoins. That pivot makes Timon an accidental but compelling case study in how stablecoin adoption in Africa is being driven not by crypto ideology but by practical demand from people who simply need their money to work wherever they are.