Before Odunayo Eweniyi became one of Nigeria’s most recognisable technology entrepreneurs, she was a young computer engineering graduate trying to understand what kind of problems she could solve — and what kind of company she wanted to build.
Her journey was not defined by one breakthrough idea. It was shaped by experimentation, difficult questions, an early startup that exposed the limits of her first approach, and the willingness to start again when she realised there was more to learn.
Eweniyi was raised by two professors in a home where academic discipline, reading and problem-solving were taken seriously. She went on to study Computer Engineering at Covenant University, where she graduated with a First-Class degree and finished at the top of her class.
By the time she left university, she had the option of following a more conventional academic path. She had secured admission to graduate programmes abroad, but instead of continuing into postgraduate study, she chose to enter Nigeria’s young and rapidly developing technology ecosystem.
Her first major step into entrepreneurship came with PushCV.
Straight out of university, Eweniyi teamed up with Somto Ifezue and Joshua Chibueze to build a platform designed to tackle one of Nigeria’s persistent problems: unemployment. PushCV helped employers screen job applicants, with the aim of making the process of finding and hiring talent more efficient.
Building PushCV gave Eweniyi something that a classroom could not: an education in what it actually meant to build a company.
The business gained traction and attracted venture funding, but the experience also exposed her to the complicated realities of building an early-stage company in Nigeria. There were operational challenges, difficult market dynamics and questions about how far the original model could grow.
Those experiences would become important to what came next.
Eweniyi began to understand that building a successful company was not simply about having a good idea. It required paying attention to how people behaved, recognising when an idea needed to change and being willing to question assumptions — including her own.
Then, on New Year’s Eve in 2015, an unlikely image caught the team’s attention. It was a photograph of a traditional wooden savings box, known in Nigeria as a kolo, filled with cash.
For Eweniyi, the significance was not simply the object itself. The kolo represented a behaviour she already understood: people were finding practical, sometimes old-fashioned ways to make themselves save.
The question was whether that behaviour could be adapted to a digital world. That question eventually led to Piggybank.ng, which would later become PiggyVest.
But what mattered at this stage was not yet the company that would emerge. It was Eweniyi’s ability to recognise everyday behaviour and see a problem worth exploring.
There was scepticism about whether Nigerians had enough disposable income to make micro-savings a viable business. There was also a more fundamental question: would people trust an online platform with their money when traditional financial institutions had spent decades building familiarity through physical branches and established systems?
For Eweniyi and her co-founders, those questions became part of the work. The early days were lean. The team had limited resources, and Eweniyi became deeply involved in the practical work of building the business, from operations and finance to product development.
Rather than assuming they already knew what customers wanted, they paid attention to how people used the product and what they struggled with. Complaints became feedback. Feedback became product changes. Product changes led to new features.
The company evolved through that process, but so did Eweniyi as a founder.
Her story at this stage was not simply about creating a successful fintech company. It was about learning how to listen, adapt and keep building when the original version of an idea was not enough.
What began as a digital savings product eventually expanded into a broader savings and investment platform. As the business grew, so did Eweniyi’s profile within Nigeria’s technology ecosystem and beyond. She would go on to receive international recognition, including appearances on the Forbes Africa 30 Under 30, TIME100 Next and Bloomberg 50 lists.
But those recognitions tell only the later part of the story. Before the accolades came the uncertainty. Before the millions of users came the questions about whether anyone would use the product. Before PiggyVest became a familiar name came PushCV — and the lessons that Eweniyi carried from one company into another.
Eweniyi did not begin with a guaranteed formula for success. She began by trying something, learning from it and remaining open to what could come next. The kolo was not simply the inspiration for a fintech company. It was one moment in a much longer process of learning how to recognise opportunities, test ideas and turn observations into something useful.
Before she won, there was no certainty that the next idea would work. There was only the decision to keep building.
