Beyond Fintech: How Ola Daramola Is Building a Financial Institution for Africa’s Future

    ….The Bluebulb CEO & Co-founder’s next challenge is not growth. It is building a company that outlasts its founder.

Ola Daramola has always been drawn to ambitious projects. Before he co-founded Bluebulb, the first-class engineering graduate worked with the Dangote Group on large-scale infrastructure, including the Dangote Petroleum Refinery, which was Africa’s largest oil refinery when it was inaugurated in May 2023.

That experience shaped more than his technical skills. It taught him how scale is planned, how execution is managed, and why the systems underneath a project matter as much as what is built on top of them.

It also showed him a weakness in Africa’s business environment. Companies could have strong products, capable leadership and real commercial opportunities, yet still be held back by unreliable international payments and fragmented financial infrastructure.

With his co-founders, Daramola set up Bluebulb Financials to help businesses manage international payments and foreign exchange more reliably. The company operates as a UK-regulated business and launched operations in Nigeria in 2025.

But the ambition has kept growing. Daramola is now taking Bluebulb beyond payments, towards enterprise treasury: giving businesses the tools to see and control their liquidity, settlement and obligations across markets with the confidence of global companies. The clearest expression of that shift is Orbita, Bluebulb’s enterprise treasury platform, which the company showcased at Moonshot by TechCabal in October.

The move comes as the African tech ecosystem is being judged differently. TechCabal Insights recorded 84 mergers and acquisitions worth US$11.4 billion in disclosed value by late August 2026, while African startups raised US$2.49 billion in the first nine months of the year. As capital and deals flow, investors, acquirers and partners are asking a harder question than how fast a company is growing. They want to know whether it can be trusted to last.

That question sits at the centre of Daramola’s thinking. He describes the life of a company in four stages: survival, strategic relevance, institutional readiness and, finally, strategic optionality.

A company must first prove it can survive. Then it must show why it matters, to customers who could not easily replace it. Next, it must build the systems, controls and governance that let it endure beyond the energy of its founders. Only then does it earn optionality: the freedom to stay independent, raise capital, form partnerships, acquire, or be acquired on its own terms.

“Growth makes you bigger. Strategic value makes you matter. Institutional strength makes you endure,” he says.

The third stage is the hardest, and Daramola is candid about why. It asks founders to give up some of the control that made them successful: to delegate decisions they once made alone, to write down what used to live in their heads, and to welcome board committees, auditors and compliance officers who ask difficult questions. In a 2025 essay on the “brutal phases” of building a startup, he described the risk of skipping that work bluntly: “Capital doesn’t solve problems; it only amplifies cracks.”

For African companies, he argues, the bar is higher still. Businesses from the continent often face closer scrutiny from international banks and investors, and Nigeria and South Africa were removed from the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list only in October 2025. Daramola treats that not as a complaint but as a reason to build institutions whose governance can withstand any examination.

At Moonshot, asked what is hardest to replicate when a business enters a new market, he answered: “I think it’s establishing trust.” It is the thread that runs through his philosophy. Products can be copied and capital can be raised. Trust has to be built, one relationship and one year at a time.

That is why, for Daramola, the goal is not simply a successful fintech business. It is a lasting African financial institution: one that customers depend on, employees are proud to serve and partners can trust.

His journey began with engineering the physical infrastructure of industrial development. His next chapter is about engineering the financial infrastructure of African commerce.

The greatest achievement of a founder, he believes, is not building a company that succeeds, but building an institution that keeps succeeding without him.