The LoftyInc Story Through the Pen of Michael Oluwagbemi, Executive Partner, LAPL

LoftyInkers
13 min readMar 3, 2022

On February 19, 2022 — LoftyInc Allied Partners Limited turned 13 years old.

Exactly 2 years after its founding, Wennovation Hub was launched as her premier platform to intervene in the emerging innovation ecosystem of Nigeria. As seen in one of the pictures, it shows 3 of the 4 partners visiting Wennovation Hub together (for the first time) some time later that year (2011) after our launch in Ikeja.

Way before incubators and accelerators were sexy, and any was privately organized in Nigeria, together with our partners at Africa Leadership Forum, the platform was launched and was later spurn off on Feb 27, 2015 as its own independent entity still managed by LoftyInc.

With over 25,000 entrepreneurs directly supported with programs crossing across Nigeria and West Africa, Wennovation Hub today has 3 campuses in Lagos, Ibadan and Abuja. Start-Ups like Fuelmetrics Limited, Crop2Cash and Afrimash Company Limited once called Wennovation Hub their home.

Wennovation Hub is an active member of the AfriLabs network.

Fun Fact? WeHub once hosted the Afrilabs Secretariat for a brief time in 2016.

Wennovation Hub was the culmination of core partnership formation within LoftyInc Allied Partners Limited, which saw fate and serendipity bring the four Partners together. Not one single picture can express this formation.

First it started with Wole Odetayo and I being primary school classmates and seatmates, then with Damilola Agboola, CCP and Idris Ayodeji Bello getting connected upon migration to the USA by attending the same college and having the same anchors upon landing in Houston. Fate later connected Dami and I working at the Energy Center on a Chevron Project. The rest as they say is history.

Through connections to Marsha Wulff who became our first advisor and true believer, to visits to Yuwei Shi at then (Monterey Institute of International Studies) MIIS and Frontier Market scout program thereafter, we pushed forward the partnership that birthed the Wennovation Hub platform and ultimately LoftyInc Capital Management some 5 odd years later in 2017.

Fun Fact? The most memorable moments of the partnership formation process was when Idris Ayodeji Bello finally joined the awesome three — we gave him a tie at Pebble Beach in Monterey, California to celebrate. Still my best hire to date.

The early days of Wennovation Hub started with an unlikely meeting at the All Bankers Conference of Development Economics (ABCDE) in Sweden, where we met the leadership of Africa Leadership Forum and led to sealing the deal to open up at Ikeja.

Subsequently, we had the support of important advisors along the way, Chief of which was Marsha Wulff who just believed in the dream of leveraging innovation to create jobs in Africa to tackle the perennial problem of youth unemployment. From one event to another, from East Coast to West Coast & Gulf Coast, she was there as we sought to build the basic blocks of support for the idea.

As the early ecosystem begun to take shape in Lagos, the need to have angel investor support led to contacts with ‘Tomi Davies and Ayodeji Balogun then of TEF to launch the Lagos Angel Network which came to being in 2012/2013 time frame after an inaugural event organized by LoftyInc Allied Partners Limited with the support of The World Bank, and the formal launch further translated to early start-up/investor engagements in the ecosystem.

There were good and bad times, but we persisted. I remember when we were temporarily dislocated into IdeaHub, myself and Idris visited Wole there. We made some important investment bets at this time on our start-ups instead of getting a space of our own in Lagos (this led to our campus move to Ibadan), and those bets paid off handsomely few years later. Fora became Andela which later led to bets in Flutterwave , Moove Africa and more recently, Talent City.

Never forsake the days of little beginnings. Tough times don’t last.

2012 was important because it marked the beginning of LoftyInc Allied Partners Limited’s search for a sustainable business model. We had a difficult 2011 but we also had an incredible belief that we were on to something.

2012 was also a year of focus when two of the partners joined the only one that was already full time, to focus on the growing but struggling start-up that it was.

What is now regarded as the core of the parent company, the Project Advisory and Innovation Development (PAID) division found its early beginning in 2012/2013 and continued to grow steadily through the years.

The idea was simple: even established companies need innovation to grow and create jobs. Why not offer what we already do for start-ups to established corporates, public sector and development organizations? We did.

One of the pictures shows the signing of our first contract at our US office in Houston in 2012. We continued to seek and find clients to support through the successive years, and ultimately in 2014 we landed a pilot development project for the health sector with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

ProNOV (Project Nerve on Verge) was one of few among thousands of applications that was selected for the Grand Challenge Grant, and one of three that ultimately made it to the scale up phase two years later from that 2014 cohort.

LoftyInc went on to execute 2 of the 3 scale up opportunities for our cohort. In fact, upon request by the foundation, we assisted one of our cohort members, proving that great execution is a service.

Beyond that we also sought to develop truly audacious projects — that journey sometimes took us to far away lands, including China. We signed MOUs, brought in partners and kept pushing even when we failed or the system failed us.

In the middle of this “PAID formation” period, from 2011 to 2016, the highlights for us as Partners was how our lives also changed incredibly on the most personal level. In one of the pictures, you see me holding the first LoftyInc baby born to Partner, Damilola Agboola, CCP in 2011. From then on, we multiplied. We thank God for small mercies.

2016/17 were years of contemplation and transition. In our eight year, we were no longer a start-up but the ecosystem was in start-up mode.

It was also during this period we transitioned our headquarters from Lagos/Houston to Abuja, even while strengthening our presence across all geographies including strong partnerships in Kaduna.

Periods of consultations at points of inflections are enormously critical in the growth of functional organization. Our determination of the path of growth of the ecosystem led to consultations that ultimately led to the formation of LoftyInc Capital Management

Key moments in 2017, was the visit of Marsha Wulff to Nigeria and also for the first time, all four Partners of LoftyInc Allied Partners Limited actually were at the same place physically and as such in a single picture.

Consequent upon our co-launching of the Lagos Angel Network in 2013, we remained focused on bringing the much-needed patient capital to seed the ecosystem.

Our Partner, Idris Ayodeji Bello led the charge with his uncommon definition out of an Oxford University dorm room inspiration of what an AFROPRENEUR is; of course, aside from registering the domain name, we made sure to launch the angel network that will go on to help discover and enable these novel tribes of sagacious young Africans that have since shaped our ecosystem.

There was an interview on CNN( https://lnkd.in/d5SQ-PHv ) and a chance meeting with Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and a number of other early investments — lots of them failed, and few succeeded — which added to the tapestry of a methodology we now call — Learning by Losing Money.

This journey led to early investments in insanely successful startups like Andela , Flutterwave and Fuelmetrics Limited . We also got at least 20–25 angel investors recruited to the cause by 2016, of what will go on to become the AFROPRENEUR Angel Group operated as the Fund 1 of LoftyInc Capital Management. That universe today boasts of over 200 angels and well over 180 investments in the last 9 years.

The angel investor mobilization cause was definitely improved by the visit of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook Founder). It helped that Mark liked what our angels had liked, and a lot of folks reached out after that 2016 visit on how they could join that journey.

By 2017, that work had matured sufficiently because of the After Mark (AM) effects that we were considering launching a formal fund. One of the pictures below showed when Idris, Marsha and I were brainstorming on what will go on to become the Fund 2 that launched LCM. The rest as they say is history.

One interesting fact about this period was that, from 2013 to the early days of LCM in 2017 was the insane role that Amala (and good food) played in encouraging our founders and investors alike to meet. The Amala tour of Lagos and Ibadan, remain golden — last two frames are a testimonial to this.

As the investment thesis in African start-ups became clearer in 2017/2018, we took on the onerous task of launching a formal venture capital fund. With funds from very few ever-supportive LPs including our own dear Marsha, we took the bull by the horn.

Bear in mind, fund management by a bunch of engineers with MBAs who have a hunch that generally perceived risky early stage investment was inherently de risked in frontier risky African markets (think about that), makes sense was kind of off. But we pressed on. It was not the first time we were told we didn’t know what we were doing- and we had many of those — so how does it matter?

Upon a visit to Marsha Wulff at heavenly Carmel/Pebble Beach where I also met our future COO Lydia Idem, I flew back to Houston to convince Idris Ayodeji Bello that this was the way to go. This was not the first time I will be recruiting him to doing something tough — remember?

Marsha followed it up with a visit to Nigeria, series of investment summits in Lagos and Houston and plenty of future visits to European capitals and DFI offices from London (where I donned the rare suit), to New York, to Abidjan, Cape Town and to Luxembourg.

Fun Fact:

In the midst of some of these frustrating fundraising journeys, we also ensured to have fun by seeking to expand our investment horizon. It was a period we really began to explore our beautiful continent. Most memorable were trips to Mali that took us to Bamako and the banks of the River Niger. I was excited to see a power container with the logo of University of Houston where 3 of the 4 partners had been students at both undergrad and grad levels for example.

Egypt also opened up in this period, as I just needed one trip to convince me that the land of Pharaoh held the promise for Africa’s rebirth and innovation renaissance (see me on the boat).

The early days of LoftyInc Capital Management were periods of incredible learning and perseverance, but it was also a period of opening up.

LoftyInc AFROPRENEUR Fund 2 was closed in 2018/2019 just as our world was about to change. But not without first donning our dancing shoes to celebrate a decade of existence.

Our tenth year began with a bang, celebrating 10 years of living dangerously some would say.

We set a goal to achieve a billion naira revenue in 3 years at the preceding retreat held in December 2018 in a year where we barely pulled in 100 million naira. But this was just another phase we were determined to get there.

We were focused first on figuring out in the 2018/2019 timeframe how to have the mainstream economy feel the impact of our work in the innovation ecosystem even as the sector matured. The Project Advisory & Innovation Development division was critical to this work. We launched key initiatives like Digital Skills Initiative, AgriBiz, Monitoring, and Evaluation & Impact Assessment for Public Sector among many others.

These engagements led us to working with clients in the public, private and development sectors on projects ranging from rice value chain in agriculture to public sector clients at federal and state levels enabling infrastructure or learning by school children turned innovators, or working with development organizations like Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF) , Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH , USAID and Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. among many others.

This period heralded a period of growing national and continental impact from LoftyInc even as we scaled our presence, opening new vistas of opportunities for others.

We also launched our newest hub in Lagos in 2019, even as we began to expand the innovation footprint beyond Lagos & Abuja into the hinterlands.

FunFact — this was also the period we started consciously paying attention to building what we now call the LoftyInc Way — the culture of excellence, collaboration and social impact that forms the bedrock ethos of how we operate.

How to ensure that our workforce across 7 cities respond to the stimuli of innovation similarly but positively, was a hard nut to crack, that was soon going to be challenged when a virus and pandemic beckoned at the end of that year and changed our world in 2020

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, and we had to shut down the office for almost four months, we were probably one of the better-prepared companies in terms of disaster planning.

Prior November, I remember having an All Hands Meeting with the team where I talked about oncoming inevitable changes that may see many people leaving and many newcomers — it was prophetic.

COVID-19 shook the world and changed 2020. It also accelerated digitization, which meant everything we had been building in the PAID Division was now much sought after.

Aside from PAID, our angels in the Afropreneur Angel Group, the Evergreen Fund 1 operated via LoftyInc Capital Management were super active in hibernation with their numbers doubling. That year the theme was leaving our comfort zone as investments quadrupled from 2019 levels and we became really active in new regions including North Africa.

We look back at 2020 with fondness; it was a year we finished strong despite all the obstacles life threw at us…including zoom, webinars and remote work.

On February 19th, LoftyInc Allied Partners Limited became a teenager. It is a milestone no doubt, but give us one last time to relish our pre-teenage years.

The last year has been one great acceleration of our works on various fronts, the year of exits and continental entries we like to think of it — 2021 was a year like no other especially for our fund management arm, LoftyInc Capital Management

It was a year we experienced multiple unicorn exits — Andela & Flutterwave — and even sealed more remarkable ones that are now gestating in the early parts of 2022. It was also the year we launched our third fund, LoftyInc AFROPRENEUR Fund 3 and welcomed a strengthened team led by our indefatigable COO, Lydia Idem

Wennovation Hub, at her tenth year we moved into a brand new space in Victoria Island for the first time in our history, and positioned to find the next wave of unicorns (watch this space) — building synergies across the group.

On the ecosystem front, while fundraising for Fund 3 and simultaneously closing investments, Idris Ayodeji Bello and I transversed the continent from Sudan to Ghana to South Africa — looking for the next unicorns. To those who welcomed us to their homes, we say thank you. It was a year we appreciated Africa more for all her beauty and it was beautiful hosting AfriLabs in Abuja, the capital of her most populous and largest economy.

2021 wouldn’t be such an epochal year if we didn’t mention the seeds sown that will soon germinate — in homeland security, climate adaptation, MicroFinance and charter city initiatives — for example working with Iyinoluwa Aboyeji led Future Africa on Talent City initiative.

The idea that we must democratize innovation on the continent is what powers us into the future and keeps us focused as we have drawn a curtain on our teenage years, and look towards a future that beckons.

In all we are grateful!!!

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LoftyInkers

LoftyInc Allied Partners Limited is an innovation development company that drives social impact across Sub-Saharan Africa. This is where we share our insights.