In 2016, Bolaji Yusuf was a young software engineer eager to write elegant code. Today, he is not only the founder of WebuildX, a software engineering company building scalable products for clients across Africa, North America, and Europe, but also the brain behind Klerra, a document intelligence platform with a bold vision to make every document intelligent, actionable, and accessible to anyone, anywhere.
Bolaji’s story reflects a larger shift happening in African tech: the evolution of engineers into leaders, and of problem-solvers into ecosystem builders. His path shows that, beyond technical skills, Africa’s next generation of innovators must master leadership, team-building, and the discipline of applying their skills in creating world-class products.
How it all started
Bolaji’s path into leadership started long before LightForth. Long before he held formal leadership positions, he was already experimenting, building, and leading in smaller but formative ways.
His tech journey started in 2014 as a curious teenager with a laptop, teaching himself graphic design and selling his first $5 logo on Fiverr. That early win sparked a creative drive that saw him dabble in video editing, music production, and website building. By 2016, while studying Finance at Lagos State University, he was already running a small web design side hustle for students.
In 2017, he launched a music blog for independent artists, growing it to over 1,000 monthly visitors and earning his first $100 online. The desire to turn the blog into an app, and the cost of hiring developers pushed him to learn to code. That decision opened the door to software engineering.
From 2018 to 2023, Bolaji developed his technical and leadership skills through a series of roles across different industries. He started by building experimental platforms to understand product development from concept to execution, then moved through positions at EdTech, FinTech, logistics, and blockchain companies. His responsibilities evolved from individual backend engineering work to DevOps, and eventually to leading engineering teams across multiple disciplines. Throughout this period, he progressed from contributing individually to products that served thousands of users to directing an entire technical team, with leadership becoming an increasingly central part of his role
These cumulative experiences prepared him for what came next: his defining leap at LightForth.
The leap at LightForth
In 2024, Bolaji became CTO at LightForth, a US-based career buddy platform. Unlike his previous roles, this wasn’t about stepping into leadership, but about building leadership at scale.
From scratch, he grew a 30-member product team across engineering, product, design, and QA. He structured them into PODs, instilled a strong engineering culture, and built systems that worked across time zones. In just a year, the team shipped five AI products, delivering on ambitious timelines while keeping quality intact.
The role stretched him in ways pure coding never could. It forced him to think beyond solutions to technical problems and think more about people, processes, and strategy. These set the stage for his next ventures: WebuildX and Klerra.
The companies Bolaji went on to build
Managing a team spread across different countries and time zones comes with its own challenges, which include misaligned communication, varying work cultures, and uneven infrastructure. However, Bolaji leaned into discipline and defining qualities, introducing frameworks that ensured accountability, trust, and clarity.
Founding WebuildX
By the time he launched WebuildX, Bolaji had seen firsthand what makes and breaks engineering teams. He wanted to create a company that would help other startups avoid common pitfalls while scaling. This was influenced by what Bolaji had seen go wrong in other teams, so he built so these could be avoided in other businesses.
WebuildX focuses on helping founders and businesses design, build, and scale software products that can thrive locally and internationally. Its mission is to set the global standard for engineering excellence and design perfection, creating solutions that define what exceptional looks like.
WebuildX has partnered with startups and enterprises across different sectors, offering web 3 development, web app and mobile app development, UI/UX design, and DevOps/cloud services amongst others.
The future with Klerra
While running WebuildX, Bolaji has been building toward the future. His newest venture which he co-founded, Klerra, is a document intelligence platform designed to reimagine the way businesses interact with documents.
Klerra’s vision is simple but transformative: “Make every document intelligent, actionable, and accessible to anyone, anywhere.”
In markets like Africa, where businesses are often slowed down by manual processes, inaccessible records, and fragmented systems, intelligent documents could be the difference between stagnation and exponential growth.
