How Jim Ovia’s $5.5 million bet on Moniepoint built a billion-dollar unicorn

Before Google, Visa and Development Partners International came in, Jim Ovia was there first.

Nigeria’s richest banker wrote Moniepoint its earliest significant cheque when almost no one else would. In 2019, Quantum Capital Partners, the investment firm owned by the Zenith Bank billionaire, led a $5.5 million Series A round into what was then called TeamApt, a scrappy bank software company founded by former Interswitch executive Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike. The round came from a single investor. That investor was Ovia.

At the time, TeamApt had bootstrapped its way to profitability, servicing 26 financial institutions and processing roughly $160 million in monthly transactions without raising a dime of external capital. The business had a track record but little profile. Ovia’s cheque changed that.

Eniolorunda had left Interswitch in 2015 to start the company, competing directly against the billion-dollar payments group he had just exited. TeamApt’s early business was unglamorous: back-office software for banks, per-project revenue, no venture backing. The Ovia investment gave the company its first institutional capital and the validation to think bigger.

The pivot came after. TeamApt rebuilt itself around the merchant and agent banking opportunity, rebranding as Moniepoint and targeting the millions of Nigerian businesses that remained locked out of formal financial services. The model worked. By 2022, QED Investors and British International Investment led a Series B. By October 2024, Development Partners International and Google’s Africa Investment Fund led a $110 million Series C that formally pushed Moniepoint past the $1 billion unicorn threshold. Visa joined the cap table shortly after. LeapFrog Investments came in during a $90 million Series C extension in October 2025, bringing total funding to $256 million across six rounds.

Moniepoint now processes more than 800 million transactions monthly, with a monthly total value exceeding $17 billion. It operates profitably, serves millions of businesses across Nigeria, and has expanded into personal banking and the United Kingdom. The Financial Times has ranked it Africa’s fastest-growing fintech for two consecutive years.

Ovia, who founded Zenith Bank in 1990 and built it into Nigeria’s most profitable lender, has a long history of backing Nigerian financial infrastructure early. His stake in Zenith Bank alone is currently worth more than $640 million. The Moniepoint bet, made when the company was still called TeamApt and had never raised outside capital, now stands as one of the sharpest early-stage calls in Nigerian fintech history.

(Billionaires Africa)