Adedeji Olowe is founder and chief executive of Lendsqr, the lending-as-a-service company that gives banks, fintechs, and microfinance institutions a cloud loan management system, with plans that start free and rise to $500 a month.
Leaving The Bank To Build For Lenders
Olowe spent nearly 20 years at some of Nigeria’s largest banks before he decided the gap was not another digital lender, but software that existing lenders could afford. He has told the story of an earlier attempt, Lendstack, that did not work, and of restarting on 1 November 2018 with $55,000 from friends and an assistant, Grace Effiom, who later became head of enterprise. That restart became Lendsqr.
They won early customers by turning one client’s codebase into a demo app called Irorun. Liberty Credit and KrediBank asked to use it before the rewrite was finished. A later attempt to grow through advertising brought in loan seekers instead of lenders, and burned more than $100,000 in a year. Olowe pulled back, rebuilt the web product, and made it self-serve so a new lender could get running without waiting weeks.
A Low-Cost Ecosystem
Lendsqr now serves more than 7,000 lenders in Nigeria, Canada, Rwanda, the US, Zambia, and other markets, with approximately 35 staff. It raised approximately $1 million in a 2022 pre-seed round from ABV Fund, Pave, Niche Capital, and Anavo Institute. Olowe is also a trustee of Open Banking Nigeria. The product still reflects the problem he set out to solve: most small lenders cannot pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for software, and they still need a way to create loan products, make decisions, disburse money, and collect it back.
