On How I Got Funded, we talk to founders who have gotten funding from Venture Capitals, Angel Investors, Banks, Accelerators and more on how they secured these funds to scale their startup. We start off this series with Ibrahim Oladele, founder and C.E.O. of Vesicash an Nigeria’s first escrow financial service company.
Tell us briefly how you started Vesicash and the journey so far?
It’s an interesting story. I and my co-founders before Vesicash had a project called Rushstar. Rushstar was solving a logistic problem in Africa using international networks abroad and providing cheaper rates for customers locally. Soon orders increased more than our network and we had to use more people abroad, but then we lost money to these people abroad due to unfulfilled orders, this was when we spotted a problem that led to the birth of Vesicash to solve the problem of fraud in digital commerce.
What was the first money you put into your business?
The first money that went into the business was our personal money, me and my co-founders, that lasted for approximately five to six month. We had to bootstrap and together we raised about $20,000.
At what point did you know it was time to get external funding?
This was around December 2018 by now we knew what we wanted to do, had done market research and knew we needed more people on the team to help us achieve our goals, especially on the product team. To bring in more people, we needed more funds and we were running out of cash. So we saw red signs, cash was going and we had so much to do to keep the business running. To prevent shutting down operations because there was no cash, we reached out to an investor and he invested in the company.
How did you meet an investor at the early stage?
Another interesting thing actually, before we bootstrapped, or executed or even launched, we had an investor we had pitched to. However, he wasn’t willing to invest at that time, it was too risky and we hadn’t done anything so he told us to go and start working on our idea, figure things out and come back. We followed his advice, started working on our idea with our personal money, developed strategies, did market research and more, by the time we came back to him and gave him reports on what we had done, he was ready to support us and he invested.
You can listen to the conversation here.
