Shola Akinlade is a software engineer. He is the co-founder of Paystack, Nigeria’s foremost payment platform. Paystack serves over 17,000 businesses, and processes over 15% of all online payments in Nigeria. During its launch in January 2016, Paystack already had a waiting list of approximately 300 businesses.

Shola started his career as a Management trainee (specialising in database management) at Heineken. Shortly after that, he spent the next 5 years working on a software called Precurio, an open source collaboration platform like Dropbox, which was used by over 200,000 organisations. While working on the software, he was approached by a number of banks to help them build their software. This was when he realised that there was a need to make payments easier for businesses in Africa. With his co-founder, Ezra Olubi they built the Paystack platform.

Shola was born in Lagos and went to St. Gregory’s College for his secondary education. He proceeded to Babcock University, where he attained a degree in Computer Science.