Cossi Achille Arouko noticed the problem while watching someone else solve it.
As tech lead at Paystack, the Stripe-owned Nigerian fintech, he watched how Divvy, a US finance management platform, handled the company’s expenses: corporate cards issued to employees, automatic spending limits, and reimbursement requests processed without anyone chasing anyone.
It was clean. It was controlled. And when he looked around at the African businesses he knew, nothing existed as it did for them.
“I realised there was also a market for businesses,” Arouko says. “Seeing Divvy and other platforms tackling expense management in the US and Europe — that’s when I thought we could work on that for this market.”
That observation, made in 2021, became Bujeti that same year, a Lagos-based fintech that has since grown into what its founders call a finance control centre for African businesses.
In practice, Bujeti works as a finance assistant; a finance manager logs in, sets spending limits on corporate cards issued to employees, approves vendor payments, tracks Value Added Tax (VAT) automatically set aside in a tax vault, and runs payroll, all without switching between tools or chasing anyone on WhatsApp.
Alongside co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Samy Chiba, Arouko has spent the last four years turning a simple observation into a platform that today serves over 5,000 finance professionals across Nigeria and Kenya, with its sights firmly set on the rest of the continent.
Day 1: From diaspora tool to business operating system
Bujeti’s first version was a personal finance app built for the African diaspora to automate remittances back home and track how recipients spent the money. It was a real problem with a real audience.
But while building it, Arouko kept bumping into a bigger one. African businesses, from small shops to mid-sized companies, had no clean way to manage how money moved internally. Expenses were tracked over WhatsApp messages. Vendor payments were approved over Slack. Reconciliations happened at the end of the month, in spreadsheets, with all the errors that imply.
Bujeti pivoted to a business-to-business (B2B) model in 2022, and Chiba, who was working at Ariane Space, a commercial space transport company in France at the time, joined as a co-founder. The two had a clear founding idea: control and transparency over how money moves within a business. Not just sending and receiving, but everything in between.
Getting their first serious client illustrated exactly how hard that idea was to sell. The team had demoed to a global food delivery company’s finance team in Lagos. The accountants loved it. Then, a decision-maker elsewhere in the organisation blocked adoption.
Arouko found the CEO online, sent a message, suggested coffee, and demoed again. The CEO called the Nigerian office immediately, “What’s going on? Why are we not on this?” They’ve been customers since.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Arouko says when asked if going over the finance team’s head has had to happen often. “Finance teams can sometimes feel threatened by it. But after a while, they end up adopting.”
Day 500: YC, a crisis, and the night nobody slept
In early 2023, Bujeti got into Y Combinator’s Winter cohort, one of a handful of African startups to make it into the much-coveted accelerator that year. Chiba and Arouko packed up and went to San Francisco.
Then Bujeti’s payment provider went down due to operational issues.
“Everything happened in 24 hours,” Chiba says.
With a nine-hour time difference and their team back in Nigeria scrambling, the founders spent the night managing the crisis on one front and hunting for a new provider on another. By morning, they had found one. The new provider asked when they were ready to integrate. The answer was: now.
Paperwork signed, integration started, Bujeti was back up within 24 hours. They were five minutes late for their YC office hours meeting. The YC partners weren’t happy until they heard why.
“They actually ended up liking it,” Arouko says. “They realised we were in crisis and we’d fixed it.”
The crisis clarified something important about what Bujeti was building. In markets like the US, a fintech can assume stable infrastructure and layer a product on top. In Africa, you can’t. Providers go down. Systems break. The businesses that survive are the ones that have built redundancy into their foundations.
“We are able to build on top of a broken ecosystem,” Chiba says, or as Arouko prefers, an immature one. The distinction matters to him. Broken implies unfixable. Immature implies a direction.
YC reinforced something else: the scale of what they were competing for. In San Francisco, Bujeti was in the same room as Brex, Ramp and other giants of global business finance.
“It made me understand that yes, Bujeti is an African company,” Chiba says, “But our competitors, our colleagues, are the biggest players on the planet.”
In December 2023, Bujeti closed a $2 million seed round led by Y Combinator, with participation from Entrée Capital, Voltron Capital, Kima Ventures, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, and Mono CEO Abdul Hassan.
Day 1000: Tax vaults, partnerships and the next frontier
By 2025, Bujeti had expanded beyond expense management into something harder to categorise. Corporate cards. Multi-currency payments. Payroll. Automated reconciliation. And most recently, tax management, a product the team had been building before Nigeria’s 2025 Tax Act came into force, but landed at exactly the right moment when it did.
“Opportunity meets preparation,” Arouko says. The platform’s Tax Vault automatically ring-fences collected Value Added Tax (VAT) and withheld taxes so that businesses can’t accidentally spend the money before remittance is due.
It was a product Arouko had wanted as a business owner himself. “As a business lead, if I need it, it should be on Bujeti because other business leads will definitely need it too.”
The institutional partnerships have followed the product. Bujeti says it partnered with the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) and, more recently, with Nigeria’s Presidential Committee on Economic and Financial Inclusion (PreCEFI) — operating under the Office of the Vice President — as part of the SheIsIncluded initiative, a nationwide programme to financially empower women-owned businesses. Bujeti is the technology layer.
In 2025, Bujeti launched an AI-powered assistant feature for business owners to interact with. Bujeti uses AI to manage data, automate repetitive tasks, detect fraud patterns, and generate financial reporting. What it does not do is let AI move money autonomously. “You will never see Bujeti telling you that AI is moving your money,” Arouko says.
The question of why established banks haven’t built what Bujeti has built is one Arouko enjoys.
“Banks have different priorities,” he says diplomatically. “They have shareholders, boards, constraints that we as a startup don’t have.”
The comparison he keeps returning to is Brex, the US fintech that Capital One reportedly acquired for $5 billion in early 2026. A bank could have built Brex. Instead, it bought it.
“It can be the same thing in Africa.” Aruoko is adamant.
In five years, the founders want Bujeti to be the virtual Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for every ambitious African business, a tool embedded in how a company makes decisions.
“Any growing company in Africa will use Bujeti to manage their financial operations,” Chiba says. “That’s where we see this in five years.”
If they had to do it again and could change one thing, both founders say the same thing, unprompted: build the team faster. Not just for skill, but for vision.
“A narrow mindset wouldn’t thrive at Bujeti,” Arouko says. “We are not building a company for Nigeria. We are not servicing just Nigerian customers. The people on the team need to already understand that.”
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