From the slums of Lagos to a billion-dollar valuation

Wemimo Abbey's Esusu reached a $1 billion valuation, from the slums of Lagos to 326 rejections overcome

Denied a loan in Nigeria, Wemimo Abbey watched his mother accept a predatory 400% interest loan for his college. He remembers the weight of that moment: a family making a hard choice because the doors that should have opened for them stayed shut.

That challenge became Esusu, his fintech company reporting on-time rent payments to major credit bureaus, a practice most landlords ignored. The idea is simple to state but took real persistence to build: if a tenant pays rent on time, that record should count for something, just as a loan repayment would.

​Rejected by 326 investors and once sleeping in a Denny's, Abbey kept going. The road was long and lonely at times, but each rejection sharpened the case he was making.

Today Esusu is a unicorn worth $1 billion, covering 5 million rental units. The family that banks once turned away are now, in a sense, part of the same story: the solution they needed was built by someone who had lived the problem.