With the emergence of crypto remittance companies in recent years, a group of undergraduates based in Nigeria teamed up to stake their claim in the market. Software engineers Ben Eluan and Osezele Orukpe became the CEO and CTO, respectively, of their company, Flux, a new crypto remittance company that allows merchants to send and receive money from anywhere in the world. Through Flux, users can convert fiat funds into crypto that can be sent to people in other countries without all the time constraints and exorbitant fees.

Eluan, Orukpe, and other undergraduates from Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Ile-Ife, Osun, met in their freshman year before deciding to drop out and run Flux full-time. “We dropped out to focus on our start-up and scaling it into a $1 billion company,” Eluan said. “We believe the opportunity here is huge. So for us, the right thing to do is to get the job done well. Start-ups need time so dropping out was inevitable.”

The friends, along with Israel Akintunde (VP, Engineering) and Ayomide Lasaki (head of Marketing), had been strengthening their coding skills through the programming club they started at school. They got their feet wet with their first tech start-up Jobba, an e-commerce platform that worked to connect people with merchants within the city. After growing to 20,000 users, the young scholars shut down the company due to their lack of knowledge at the time on how to properly run start-ups.

But, after witnessing a number of OAU alumni make it big in the tech world, Eluan and Orukpe were motivated to jump back into the industry. “These founders came from our school and it was a huge motivation for us. We always knew that we wanted to build something but we weren’t sure what this would be. We eventually landed on Joppa, then Flux,” Eluan shared.