Nigerian entrepreneur Suleiman Abdulkadir Mainassara has recounted how he and his partners raised about ₦8 million in 2016 to pursue a financial technology venture focused on providing banking services to underserved communities.
Suleiman Abdulkadi , reflecting on the experience in a post originally published on LinkedIn, said the fundraising was not initially conceived as a formal fundraising exercise. According to him, the capital came from several sources, including about ₦3 million each from one of his bosses and himself, ₦50,000 from a friend, and another estimated ₦2 million whose source he said he could no longer recall, although he noted that the records remained available.
The venture sought to leverage emerging financial technology infrastructure at the time. Suleiman Abdulkadir said the team worked with Remita and Interswitch and also had a partnership with Access Bank around agency banking, through which they attempted to provide banking services in underserved communities.
He added that the venture also had a relationship with Interswitch as an aggregator for the distribution of Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals to merchants.
However, Suleiman Abdulkadir said the business faced significant challenges, including slower transaction settlement and difficulties associated with building distribution networks at a time when the fintech ecosystem was still developing.
He said the team also explored the possibility of acquiring a microfinance bank as part of its broader plans. According to him, his father was chairman of a microfinance bank at the time, prompting discussions about whether it could become part of the proposed business.
Suleiman Abdulkadir acknowledged that the venture's broader vision was not sufficiently defined, which made execution difficult.
He said that, in retrospect, the team was attempting to address problems that companies such as Moniepoint and OPay would later tackle on a much larger scale.
The entrepreneur identified distribution as one of the major challenges that contributed to the venture's eventual closure. He said that, coming from a full-stack engineering background, he had not yet fully understood what was required to distribute such a product at scale.
The venture also competed for attention and resources with the main company he was overseeing at the time. With JD Lab still at an early stage, Mainassara said he eventually chose to concentrate on the existing platform rather than continue pursuing the financial services venture.
Reflecting on the experience nearly a decade later, Suleiman Abdulkadir said the episode reinforced his view that a potentially viable idea can fail because the market, technology, distribution infrastructure, available capital or founders' experience are not yet sufficiently developed.
He said the experience had also made him more cautious about judging ideas solely by their outcomes, noting that failure does not necessarily mean an idea was fundamentally wrong.
Suleiman Abdulkadir concluded that abandoning the venture was, in retrospect, a decision to preserve the opportunity to build again with greater experience and better understanding of the market.
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