Powering over 100k African businesses with Prospa’s internal dashboard: Meet Olamide Ilori, the brain behind the YC-backed fintech’s growth

Olamide Ilori doesn’t chase hype. His focus is razor-sharp: solve real problems with technology. As Lead Engineer at Prospa, a Y Combinator-backed fintech startup founded by Frederik Obasi, Chioma Ugo, and Rodney Jackson-Cole, which aims to be the “operating system” for African small businesses, offering banking, invoicing, and e-commerce tools. Ilori has been instrumental in building tools that empower over 100,000 African small businesses. 

From a self-taught coder to a driving force behind one of Nigeria’s most promising startups, his journey is a testament to grit, purpose, and a relentless commitment to impact.

“My passion for tech started with a love for problem-solving,” Ilori said in a chat with Technext, reflecting on his childhood tinkering with computers and analytical challenges. “It is about understanding a problem and building something that makes life easier.”

His tech journey did not begin in a classroom. While he holds a degree in computer engineering from the University of Ilorin, he credits little of his technical proficiency to formal education. 

“Most of my skills came from outside the classroom,” he says. “Our syllabus was outdated, and practical courses were not always taught effectively.”

Instead, he built his foundation through online learning platforms like YouTube and Udemy, followed by an online internship that became a turning point in his career. “It was just three months, but I met people who were passionate, and I got to work on real products. That experience was gold.”

That early hustle, contract jobs, late nights, and debugging solo laid the groundwork for joining Prospa in 2021.

Joining Prospa in 2021 after the fintech raised $3.8 million in a pre-seed round, Ilori stepped into a high-growth environment. With user numbers surging, he took on the challenge of building a robust operations dashboard, a “single pane of glass” for managing everything from document verification to savings, loans, and virtual cards. 

“It’s about scalability,” Ilori explains. “We needed a tool to streamline operations as we grew.”

Ilori’s impact at Prospa

At Prospa, Ilori’s work has been anything but invisible. He’s led the engineering behind key infrastructure that supports the startup’s operations and user experience, most notably the member onboarding operation dashboard. 

This internal tool is responsible for everything from document verification to ticket resolution and product oversight. “We wanted a single pane of glass for managing savings, loans, business hubs, virtual cards, you name it,” Ilori explains. “It is all about making operations scalable.”

He also spearheaded the redesign of the Prospa web dashboard, consolidating all of the company’s offerings, from savings and loan products to e-commerce capabilities and team features, into one unified platform.

Earlier this year, he led the launch of Prospa v2, a major overhaul of the mobile app aimed at delivering better UX and more robust features for small businesses. “You cannot innovate in a vacuum,” he says. “Every product decision we make is tied directly to users’ pain points.”

What sets Ilori apart is not just his technical acumen but also his approach to leadership. “Ownership and humility”, he says, are his guiding values. “Ownership means not waiting to be told what to do. Humility means you are always learning, from juniors, from peers, and from mistakes.”

Rather than managing from a distance, Ilori believes in “leading from within”. He reviews code with junior engineers not to micromanage but to exchange ideas. “You would be surprised how much you can learn from someone fresh out of bootcamp.”

He also emphasises the importance of team culture, particularly in a high-stakes startup environment. “When things go wrong, I criticise the team as a whole, not individuals. It is about building psychological safety.”

Beyond Prospa: Lifting African tech

Ilori’s influence extends far beyond Prospa. Remembering his own struggle to find a mentor, he now gives back through platforms like VEET and Developed for Good, where he mentors aspiring developers working on nonprofit projects. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences like Google DevFest and contributes to open-source projects.

He is also an active voice on Stack Overflow, helping thousands of developers overcome technical roadblocks. “It is not just about code. “It is about access,” he says. “If we want more innovation from Africa, we have to lift one another up.”

Prospa’s Pan-African vision 

Prospa’s mission, to simplify business banking in Africa, resonates deeply with Ilori. He is acutely aware of the bureaucratic maze many small business owners face when trying to open a business account or access financial tools. 

“A lot of our users are first-time entrepreneurs. They do not want friction; they want functionality,” he says.

This product philosophy, to solve the actual problem, not just build for buzz, has helped Prospa become one of the most trusted platforms for entrepreneurs in Nigeria. Ilori sees the startup’s success not just in user growth but in economic empowerment. 

“We are solving African problems for African businesses. That is going to shape the continent’s future.”

Ilori sees financial inclusion as Africa’s next big challenge. 

“Many people are still uncomfortable with fintech due to trust issues or lack of education,” he says. By building reliable, intuitive products, he believes Prospa can bridge this gap, empowering entrepreneurs and shaping Nigeria’s economy. 

Looking ahead, he is particularly excited about the role of AI in fintech, pointing to early examples of chat-based transactions and intelligent automation already emerging in the Nigerian ecosystem. 

“AI is the next wave,” he says. “But we have to make sure it is solving real problems, not just creating new hype.”

Outside work, Ilori finds inspiration in history, reading, and watching documentaries to understand patterns that shape the future. Strategic video games like Football Manager sharpen his decision-making skills, a hobby he credits for keeping his mind agile. 

For young developers, Ilori’s advice is simple but profound: pick a niche and master it. 

“Do not try to be everything. Be an expert at one thing, even if you are still learning others,” he advises. “And always make yourself part of the vision, not just the code.”

It is a philosophy that has served him well, from self-taught beginnings to the helm of one of Africa’s most promising tech teams. 

Olamide Ilori isn’t just writing software but building the infrastructure for Africa’s entrepreneurial future. With clarity, humility, and purpose, he’s proving that technology can be a powerful tool for economic empowerment.