Tosin Eniolorunda and TeamApt are in the news, and for the right reasons.

Tosin is the Managing Director of TeamApt Limited, a Nigerian finance technology company that provides digital banking business solutions and payment architecture for businesses. He and his company are making headlines for successfully bootstrapping their operations from zero to a profit-making enterprise, and topping their feat with a $5.5 million Series A investment from one of Nigeria’s shrewdest investors.

What is bootstrapping? How did Tosin bootstrap TeamApt into a multi-million dollar money-making enterprise? What does TeamApt plan to do with its new-found equity? What can you learn from Tosin and TeamApt as you set out to finance your own start-up?

Bootstrapping, in entrepreneurship, is a situation in which an entrepreneur starts a company with little capital. An entrepreneur is bootstrapping when he or she attempts to found and build a company from personal finances and/or the operating revenues of the company.

Bootstrap financing, one of the best and least expensive ways an entrepreneur can raise capital, pulls the entrepreneur up with little or no help from outside sources.

In 2015, when Tosin and some colleagues at Interswitch decided to strike out on their own, they had no money and had no friends in high places. All they had was desire, a desire to bootstrap TeamApt into profitability. As a matter of choice, Tosin and his team chose not to get external funding at the early stage of their business.

As senior executives at Interswitch, a Lagos-based, Africa-focused digital payments and commerce company that facilitates electronic circulation of money, and exchange of value between individuals and organisations, they saw a gap in the market.

In few months of operations, Tosin and his founding team set a goal to provide end-to-end service, system automation, credit/debit reconciliation and related digital products to help banks move their transactions, from merchants to banks and vice versa.

TeamApt’s first client was Computer Warehouse Group (CWG) for which it built a payment solution. It developed and launched its first Point of Sale (PoS) solution for Fidelity Bank in 2016 and, two years later, 26 Nigerian banks had adopted its PoS solution.

TeamApt followed with Moneytor, a digital banking solution that enables financial institutions to track transactions on mobile and web platforms, and Monnify, an enterprise software targeted at small and medium enterprises.

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