For millions of Lagos residents, getting to work is a daily exercise in patience. There are the traffic jams, the crowded buses, the uncertainty of getting a ride, and the familiar question of whether you will arrive on time. For Damilola Olokesusi, these were more than everyday frustrations. They were problems she began to wonder if she could solve.
Today, Olokesusi is the co-founder and CEO of Shuttlers, a shared mobility company that has spent a decade making commuting more predictable for Nigerians. The business has grown from a small experiment into a technology-driven transportation service, attracting millions of dollars in investment and industry recognition along the way.
But before the funding announcements, awards and millions of trips, Olokesusi was a young woman with an engineering degree to pursue, a conventional career to consider and no guarantee that the business she imagined would ever work.
A Different Idea of Success
Born in Lagos and raised in Ibadan, Olokesusi grew up in a family where a stable career was a familiar route to success. Her parents spent decades in public service, and she initially imagined a similar future for herself. Studying chemical engineering at the University of Lagos seemed like a sensible step towards a career in the oil and gas industry.
Entrepreneurship was not part of the plan. Then a prolonged university strike interrupted her studies. At 19, Olokesusi found herself with unexpected time on her hands. Rather than simply wait for school to resume, she attended leadership programmes that introduced her to new ways of thinking about work, purpose and the kind of impact she wanted to make.
For the first time, the conventional career path no longer seemed like her only option.
“I decided to make my life impactful,” she recalled in a 2026 interview. “I thought entrepreneurship was the best way to truly make an impact, especially in Nigeria, where there are so many problems to solve.”
It was an ambitious thought, particularly for someone who had not yet figured out what her business would be. But she had begun to see the world differently. Instead of accepting everyday problems as things people simply had to live with, she started asking what could be done about them. She did not have a business idea yet. She had something less concrete, but just as important: a growing desire to do work that mattered.
When the Problem Became Personal
Returning to Lagos brought Olokesusi face-to-face with the city’s transportation challenges. Getting around could take hours, and the journey to work was often as exhausting as the work itself. Then came a more frightening reminder of what was at stake. One of her sisters became a victim of a one-chance robbery, in which criminals use what appears to be ordinary public transport to rob unsuspecting passengers.
The incident made the question of safe transportation more personal. But another experience helped her begin to see a possible solution. During an internship at an oil and gas company, Olokesusi noticed that employees had access to organised staff buses. While their journeys followed planned routes, commuters outside the company gates were left to navigate the uncertainty of public transportation.
Why was dependable transport available to some workers but out of reach for so many others? What if people could reserve a seat on a bus, know when it would arrive and share the cost with other commuters travelling in the same direction?
That question became the starting point for Shuttlers.
A service built around scheduled routes and shared rides. It was a practical response to a problem Olokesusi knew firsthand, one that could make the working day a little less stressful for other people.
The Business Almost Ran Out of Road
Shuttlers began testing its model in 2015, initially sourcing vehicles through existing ride-hailing platforms rather than operating its own fleet. The earliest customers were friends and acquaintances, and bookings were managed manually. It was an imperfect beginning, but the team was learning what worked and what did not.
One of its first lessons arrived quickly. Picking up individual customers from different locations made journeys complicated and expensive. Within about a month, the business was running out of money. For a young founder still finding her feet, it could have been the end of the experiment.
Instead, Olokesusi went back to the drawing board. She attended training programmes, spoke to customers and approached bus operators in search of a more sustainable model. The team began shifting towards scheduled routes and corporate clients, allowing employees travelling in similar directions to share transport.
There was another obstacle. Transport was a male-dominated industry, and many operators were reluctant to work with a young team of women. Some rejected their proposals outright. Her family was also concerned. Olokesusi had chosen to pursue an uncertain business rather than immediately follow the conventional career path her engineering degree had prepared her for. The risks were real, and there was no guarantee that persistence would pay off.
Still, she continued pitching.
In September 2016, Shuttlers won the Best Idea award at Aso Villa Demo Day, a startup competition that brought its idea to wider attention and came with a ₦3 million prize. More importantly, the win helped change the way potential partners saw the business. An operator who had previously turned the team away offered them two buses to test the service.
Building a Business Before Building the Technology
In Shuttlers’ early days, there was no sophisticated app handling every part of the journey. Olokesusi was deeply involved in the everyday work of keeping the service running. She tracked payments in spreadsheets, checked passenger attendance and managed customer communication through WhatsApp and email. She was learning the business from the ground up, one booking and one commuter at a time.
The work was hardly glamorous. But it gave her an understanding of the practical problems that a future technology platform would need to solve. Gradually, the business moved beyond manual processes. As demand increased, Olokesusi had to think less like someone coordinating individual journeys and more like a founder building a company that could operate at scale.
Shuttlers eventually attracted institutional investors, raising $1.6 million in seed funding in 2021 and a further $4 million in a Series A round in 2023. The funding supported its expansion and marked a new chapter in the company’s development.
From a Young Founder to an Industry-Recognised Leader
The recognition began to follow. In 2017, Olokesusi received the Digital and Tech Award at the Women in Africa Contest in Morocco. In 2019, she was named to the Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 list in the Technology category, placing her among a generation of young Africans making their mark through innovation and entrepreneurship.
Her work has also earned international attention. In 2020, she was selected for a UK government technology exchange programme, and in 2022, she was named among the Project Management Institute’s Future 50, which recognises emerging leaders shaping the future of their fields. Vulog also recognised her among influential women in mobility globally in 2022.
She serves as UNCTAD’s eTrade for Women Advocate for Anglophone Africa, supporting greater visibility and opportunity for women entrepreneurs in the digital economy. More recently, in 2026, she received the Best Tech Startup Founder award at the Women in Technology and Engineering Summit and Awards (WITESA).
Ten Years Later, the Journey Continues
A decade after Shuttlers began its journey, the company has completed more than 10 million trips, according to figures cited in its 2026 founder profile. It has grown from a small experiment into a mobility business using technology to make shared transportation more accessible and predictable.
The ambition is bigger than helping people arrive at work on time. Olokesusi sees opportunities to improve how urban transportation operates across African cities, connecting commuters with more efficient services and helping transport providers make better use of their resources.
It is a long way from the young engineering student who began questioning why getting to work had to be so difficult.
Yet the distance between that student and the CEO she has become was not covered in one dramatic leap. It was built through small decisions: using a university strike to explore a different future, questioning a transport system others had learnt to accept, changing a business model that was not working, and continuing to pitch after being told no. Her growth was not simply about becoming more confident in her idea. It was also about becoming more willing to change it.
Before the investment, the international recognition and the decade milestone, Damilola Olokesusi was a young woman trying to imagine a future different from the one she had always expected to follow. She found a problem worth solving, even when the solution was far from clear, and stayed with it long enough to build something meaningful.
Before she became the CEO of Shuttlers, she was a young woman learning to trust her own vision. Her journey is a reminder that sometimes, the first step towards building something extraordinary is deciding that the way things have always been done is not the only way they have to be.
