Wema Bank Is Quietly Becoming One of Nigeria’s Most Important Startup Backers
Wema Bank is supporting startups across all sectors, and in the process, it is emerging as one of Nigeria’s most influential engines of innovation. As corporate venture capital becomes a major pathway for startup growth across Africa, the $552 million-valued bank is redefining what a traditional financial institution can be — not just a lender, but an active builder of Africa’s next wave of high-growth companies.
At the heart of this evolution is Abdulyekeen Abdulazeez, Wema Bank’s Innovation Venture Manager. Drawing experience from Ventures Platform and the Lagos Angel Network, he leads the bank’s approach to sourcing, evaluating, and supporting early-stage founders. His guiding principle is clear: African corporates that have survived decades of regulatory shifts, economic unpredictability, and infrastructural gaps possess knowledge that founders desperately need. Wema Bank is now channeling that institutional strength directly into the startup ecosystem.
The bank’s corporate venture model is not about chasing fast equity wins. Instead, Wema focuses on strategic value — giving founders immediate access to tools, infrastructure, and distribution channels that traditionally take years to secure. Through ALATPay, startups can plug into wallet APIs, payout APIs, digital rails, and enterprise-grade systems that drastically accelerate launches. The bank also provides market credibility, operational guidance, and in many cases becomes a paying customer. This hands-on support is one of the key reasons Wema Bank is supporting startups across all sectors successfully.
A major pillar of this strategy is Hackaholics, Wema’s flagship accelerator. The program has supported more than 100 startups over the years, including Moniepoint (formerly TeamApt), Plumter, Build Africa, Feegor, and MyItura. Hackaholics doesn’t stop at mentorship — it integrates startups into Wema’s innovation architecture, allowing founders to pilot solutions, refine their models, and scale with fewer friction points. This ecosystem approach ensures that support is not theoretical but embedded in real operations.
Unlike many corporate venture arms that limit themselves to fintech, Wema Bank is boldly sector-agnostic. Whether the startup touches finance, retail, healthcare, logistics, or creative industries, the bank is open to collaboration. Abdulazeez believes that products overlapping with traditional banking aren’t threats — they’re opportunities for partnerships. He highlights tap-to-pay and phone-to-pay as the next frontier of African fintech, with Wema already exploring this through its work with GoTap, a Hackaholics startup pioneering contactless payments.
Nigeria’s challenging macroeconomic environment has also influenced how the bank evaluates startups. With FX volatility, inflation, and rising interest rates, founders must now show clear fundamentals, disciplined unit economics, and sustainable business models. Even so, Abdulazeez argues that the biggest reasons startups fail in Nigeria are still internal — weak governance, poor founder alignment, and lack of structure — not external economic forces. Strong teams, he says, remain the most reliable predictor of success.
Inside Wema Bank, innovation does not sit in a corner. The corporate venture unit collaborates directly with the product, digital, and ideaxlab divisions, led by Solomon Ayodele. This tight internal alignment removes the bureaucratic delays common in corporate VC. When Wema backs a startup, the support is fast, practical, and execution-driven.
To measure impact, the bank focuses on how quickly startups reach product-market fit, how effectively they integrate with Wema’s APIs, and how their solutions strengthen the bank’s broader innovation roadmap. Abdulazeez personally emphasizes Net Promoter Score (NPS) — a measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty — as a metric more founders should prioritize.
By combining venture support, infrastructure access, internal adoption, and a sector-agnostic investment strategy, Wema Bank is supporting startups across all sectors in a way that accelerates both founder growth and the bank’s own innovation agenda. It’s a quiet but powerful shift — one that may shape how more African corporates approach startup investment in the years ahead.
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