Before he built financial infrastructure for African businesses, Achille Arouko was an eight-year-old boy sneaking out of school to spend an hour in a cybercafé.
That early curiosity, driven by a need to find answers, set him on a path from self-taught programming in the Benin Republic to engineering school in France, Silicon Valley networks, and eventually Y Combinator.
In this edition of After Hours, we trace how those formative encounters with technology shaped Arouko’s thinking and led him to Nigeria’s tech ecosystem.
First encounter with technology
I grew up in the Benin Republic, and the most “technological” thing I had access to as a child was our television. I spent my days watching TV, playing football, or just hanging out with friends. Computers weren’t really a part of my world until one particular day at school.
I was about eight years old at the time, and this man had walked into my classroom, pointed at me, and said I was in the wrong class. He took me somewhere else, which turned out to be the cyber class, and weeks later, we were given a test. I didn’t know what cyber even meant, so I did what any confused child would do: I made up what I wrote.
While the teacher was marking the papers, the older boy sitting next to me told me he’d show me what “cyber” really was. We walked out of school and went straight to a cybercafé. I think we paid about 300 CFA francs for one hour, and I spent the time watching him use a computer, playing Mario on Windows 5.
That changed everything.
After that day, I kept telling my mother I had problems only a computer could solve. She would give me money, and I’d go back to the cybercafé. Sometimes, I lied about homework just to spend more time there. I even tried to hack the café’s time counter so I could stay longer without having to pay again.
For the first time, any question that crossed my mind had a place to go. I didn’t need a book or someone who shared my curiosity. I could just type, search, and find answers. Information became limitless.
That feeling lasted until I was about sixteen. That was when I discovered programming, and that was when I first felt powerful.
It happened during the break between high school and the university in 2010. I was watching a TV documentary about Facebook, and when it ended, I went to the cybercafé, searched for Facebook, signed up, then did the same for Twitter and MySpace, all in one day.
From there, questions flooded my mind. As usual, I searched for everything. That’s how I found French learning platforms like Comment Ça Marche, Le Site du Zéro, and Developpez.com. They had everything, from programming basics to tutorials and explanations, all in French. I’d spend hours going through them.
My mother had a Nokia slide phone, and whenever she put it down with airtime still on it, I used it to browse programming tutorials. However, I wasn’t learning in a structured way; I was just consuming everything.
Later, a cousin informed me about an entrance exam for a school that offers programs in telecommunications and computer science. I took it casually and passed. It was either that or physics, so I chose computers. That decision came with another turning point for me.
From curiosity to solutions
I studied telecommunications and computer science at a multinational school sponsored by national telecom companies across West Africa. At the time, many students came from Benin, Togo, Senegal, Cameroon, Niger, and beyond.
The school had an extraordinary Internet infrastructure. For someone like me, that was paradise. Whatever a lecturer mentioned in class, I could immediately go online and dig deeper, download papers, read ahead, and experiment. We even had a computer science club, something I had never encountered before. So I joined immediately and became its president in my second year.
Some students specialised deeply in telecoms and went on to work at companies like MTN. I chose software. Telecommunications became secondary for me because I was drawn to building things.
Although the school was headquartered in Dakar, I studied from the Cotonou campus. Fun fact: I’ve never actually been to Dakar. After two years in Benin, I continued my engineering studies in France, completing the five-year post–high school system.
Living in France really opened my eyes. I realised how much there was still to learn. I met students my age who were already experts in technologies I had never heard of and had skills people paid for. That was a shock. It made me obsessive about learning.
Turning problems into products
Around 2014, some alumni returned from San Francisco and discussed startups, venture capital, and building companies at scale. Somewhere between those semesters, I stopped thinking like a student and started thinking like a builder.
I’m a software engineer by training, so my instinct has always been simple: if there’s a problem, throw technology at it. That instinct led to multiple experiments, some of which were successful, while others were not. With my co-founder Abdul, we built different products across AI, retail, and fintech. When I personally struggled with remittances, I did what I always do: I built my own app to solve it.
I didn’t plan to start Bujeti as a company. I just wanted something that worked the way I needed it to. But when I showed it to friends, many of whom were founders, the reaction was immediate: “We need this for our businesses.”
That’s when it became clear there was a gap. Africa had neobanks, yes, but not enough tools built on top of banking, tailored for African businesses. So we decided to build it. That’s how Bujeti was born, initially as a business-to-customer (B2C) product in 2022, and then fully transitioned to a business-to-business (B2B) product in 2023.
Why build in Nigeria?
I first came to Nigeria in 2019 while working at Paystack. Compared to the Benin Republic, where the tech ecosystem is almost non-existent, Nigeria, especially Lagos, felt alive. You can meet people, build relationships, and move quickly. The density matters.
Nigeria wasn’t just a market; it was an ecosystem where building made sense.
And then, getting into Y Combinator felt like going back to school, except this time, everyone was building companies. For four months, we were surrounded by people who knew things we didn’t. People who had built what we aspired to build. It wasn’t pressure, though, more like energy.
The only real pressure was speed: build faster, talk to customers faster, and learn faster. YC validated our idea, but more importantly, it sharpened our thinking. It made us ambitious in the right way.
Technology as a way of life
Technology isn’t just part of my routine; it is my life.
We work remotely at Bujeti because that’s the only way I know how to work. I’ve turned down roles in France simply because they weren’t remote. If I don’t have Internet, I panic.
Slack is non-negotiable, and Google Maps is essential. In Nigeria, fintech apps help me survive daily expenses. Everything around me connects to the Internet, even the things you wouldn’t expect.
I like to search for knowledge rather than stumble upon opinions. That’s why I spend more time on Reddit than Twitter or Instagram. If a question crosses my mind, I want answers, not noise.
The biggest challenge when using technology is mindset. As builders, we often assume African customers won’t appreciate deeply crafted products. So we lower the bar. We build “good enough.”
But people do appreciate quality. They just need to be shown why it matters. Better products take time, money, and patience. Customers may complain at first, but they adapt. They always do.
Africa doesn’t lack talent or ideas. What we lack is the collective willingness to push further; to believe that excellence is worth paying for and worth building for.
The next decade will be AI-first. Not AI for laziness but AI for leverage.
We don’t only need AI to order food. We need it to redesign cities, improve healthcare diagnostics, distribute knowledge, and solve infrastructure problems that Africa has never fully addressed.
At Bujeti, we’re already experimenting with AI, not because it’s trendy, but because it helps us build better financial tools for African businesses.
