What does it really take to build a startup in Africa—from the first idea to the thousandth day? In Day 1–1000, we follow founders through the raw, unfiltered journey of company-building: the early scrambles, the quiet breakthroughs, the painful pivots, and the milestones that shape what a business becomes. In this inaugural edition, we sit with Tunde Akin-Moses, co-founder of Sycamore, to unpack how a simple lending idea grew into one of Nigeria’s quietly resilient fintech stories.
Day 1: A loan, a list and a leap
Tunde Akin-Moses didn’t set out to become a fintech founder. But ever since his days working in credit at a consulting firm, he had noticed a persistent gap in Nigeria’s lending system—one that seemed to punish the people who needed credit most.
Before Sycamore, he was comfortably employed at a major consulting firm and moonlighting as a small laundry business owner. But the Nigerian credit system treated those two roles very differently.
“As a nine-to-five employee, banks lined up to give me loans. But when I needed a loan for my side hustle, even with similar revenue, it was impossible,” he recalled. The disparity nagged at him, but it was not enough to quit his job. That push came later, at Lagos Business School, where he was enrolled in an MBA program that would alter the trajectory of his life.
During a case study on African fintechs serving SMEs, Akin-Moses discovered a stat that stunned him: SMEs accounted for just 1% of all bank credit in Nigeria.
Along with his classmates—Mayowa Adeosun and Onyinye Okonji—who would later become his co-founders, Akin-Moses began testing ideas for a solution.
Akin-Moses and his cofounders first explored about three ideas. First, they thought to give out educational loans to MBA students, but the capital required for such large ticket sizes was prohibitive. “It didn’t make sense to fund two students when we could help twenty small businesses instead,” he said.
The team pivoted early.
Inspired by Lending Club and Prosper in the U.S., they stumbled upon peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and realized its promise: a tech-enabled platform where individuals could pool their money to lend directly to others—typically small businesses or consumers—without relying on banks or traditional financial institutions. The model was radical but lean. It sidestepped the need for a banking license, required minimal capital, and thrived on the power of distributed trust and digital efficiency.
So they launched Sycamore from Akin-Moses’ living room.
Akin-Moses and his co-founders used their combined savings and raised around $50,000 from friends, family, and LBS classmates to start issuing microloans to SMEs. While the company couldn’t afford engineers at the beginning to build its own custom tool, it modified a third-party platform and began lending in 2019.
Sycamore disbursed its first loan—about ₦1.5 million, or ~$4100—in 2019.
The company would get its first 100 customers from its Lagos Business School Network. “We had a lot of goodwill when we started. You know people were always using us as a point of reference. And being from LBS also really helped,” Akintunde recounted.
Sycamore’s major validation came in 2020. A lender who had been watching the company quietly approached to invest ₦100 million ($260,000 at the time)—ten times the size any previous investor had committed to the company. “That was when we knew the scale of the business had changed,” Akin-Moses said.
Day 100: The Chaos comes home
By the third month, the euphoria of launching gave way to the grind of operations.
“Chaos is inevitable,” he said. “We had users now—real borrowers, real lenders—and we had to support them.”
Customer complaints started flooding in. The trio of founders wore every hat: tech support, collections, finance, and marketing. “We had all the departments on paper—HR, finance, operations—but they were just split among the three of us.”
Their “office” was still Akin-Moses’ parlor, which made hiring an uphill battle. “People would come for interviews, see our setup, and ghost us,” he laughed. Even convincing an HMO rep to finalize a health plan was awkward. “He sat in our living room and looked visibly uncomfortable.”
Still, they powered through. One early hire—a NYSC corps member—became employee number one and remains with the company today.
Akin-Moses tried convincing early joiners to be a part of the company by leveraging the individual and collective reputations of the co-founders, who had prior experience at leading global organizations such as Accenture, PwC, Shell, and the Central Bank of Nigeria.
“We told ourselves, Let’s just get to one year. Some people said they’d only take us seriously after that. So we locked in on that milestone.”
Day 1000: Firestorms, growth spurts, and institutional validation
Some of Sycamore’s most pivotal moments came between its second and third year.
By year two, the company had become profitable. “Some VCs questioned it. One asked why we didn’t burn cash on marketing instead. But we started with the mindset of being cash flow positive from day one.”
After working from his sitting room for one year, Sycamore moved into an office space in Ikeja. Sycamore now had more structure and had started growing a small team. By year three some of those talents were already getting poached by other companies, something Akin-Moses said was quite tough to deal with.
In its third year, the company became the first digital lender to be approved by the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC).
Sycamore was also transitioning from its third-party software and had begun building its own core banking software by its third year. “Building our own core banking system was one of the hardest things we’ve had to do as a business.”
The fintech had to develop the core banking software with a lean team of just three developers and one product manager. By the time the company completed its tech stack, it had already acquired a significant user base, which meant facing a data migration challenge along with the typical issues that accompany core banking migrations.
Sycamore managed the core banking change well. Then came a crisis.
In 2023, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) published a notice warning the public to stay away from the digital lender, mistakenly identifying them as an illegal lender due to a predatory loan app using “Sycamore” in its name.
“We woke up to see our name in ten newspapers. It was terrifying,” said Akin-Moses.
The company leveraged every connection they had—alumni networks, advisors, and friends in Abuja—to put out the fire. “People wrote LinkedIn posts defending us. One even contacted the Tech Association of Nigeria on our behalf.”
Eventually, Sycamore cleared its name, but not without bruises. “The agency never publicly admitted their error. Even when someone published a correction, they got angry.”
Still, Sycamore emerged stronger. That same year, Sycamore secured a BBB rating from DataPro (making the startup on par with some commercial banks).
Present day
Despite early skepticism, Sycamore has grown into a mid-sized team of over 60. Akin-Moses says his leadership style leans on respect, servant leadership, and leading by example.
“I don’t ask for effort I won’t put in myself. I believe in excellence through effort,” he said. When top talent began leaving for bigger opportunities, it stung. “Some roles were hard to fill. But it also tested our resilience and showed how we’d impacted people’s careers.”
Sycamore is no longer just a peer-to-peer lending platform. Over time, it evolved into a bigger fintech company with more offerings. In March 2025, the company secured a fund manager license from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to operate as a fund and portfolio manager. The startup is also piloting operations in Europe, with new licenses and announcements on the way.
When asked what it takes to keep a startup alive for this long, Akin-Moses mentions three things: “Set the direction. Don’t run out of money. Build a great team.”
“If you’re going to start something, find a niche you can dominate. Combine your internal strengths with external opportunities.”
Would he do it all again? “Yes. But I’d spend more time understanding the startup ecosystem upfront. We were figuring out fundraising and VC relations on the go.”
While Sycamore has built a lean and profitable team, it has largely stayed away from the public’s eye. Akin-Moses says the startup is now warming up to visibility. In the last year, Sycamore claims it has expanded its PR efforts and headlined some tech events. “We wanted to build substance first. A lot of people were making noise without having anything solid,” he said.
And now, over 1,000 days in, Sycamore is finally ready to make some noise.
