When Akindele Liasu liquidated overseas operations and poured the proceeds into a Lagos startup, the fintech world took notice. Here is exactly what he is building and why the timing could not be more precise.
There is a specific kind of founder conviction that cannot be faked. It is the kind where a person does not just believe in their idea but puts their own money, their own built assets, and their own reputation on the line for it. That is not a pitch deck move. That is skin in the game.
Akindele Liasu has that kind of conviction. And he is staking it on Keepaza.
Liasu, the founder and chairman of OH Mobility Solution Limited, recently made a decision that most entrepreneurs do not make. He restructured his UAE business operations under OH Mobility FZ LLC, directing significant founder capital from that process into Keepaza, the Nigerian payment identity platform he has been quietly building. He did not raise the money from a venture capitalist. He did not take a bank loan. He sold a piece of what he built abroad to fund what he believes matters more at home.
Why this capital move is significant
Nigeria’s startup ecosystem has produced many founders who raise institutional capital early, sometimes before the product is fully formed, before users exist, and before the problem is genuinely understood. The raise becomes the milestone rather than the product.
Akindele has reversed that logic deliberately. By committing founder capital first, he arrives at future investors with something most early stage Nigerian founders cannot claim: a working product, documented traction, and demonstrated personal belief measured not in words but in money actually spent.
“I did not want to be the founder who came to investors with only an idea and a pitch deck,” Liasu said. “I wanted to come with a working product, real users, documented traction, and money I had already put in myself.”
The company has also confirmed plans for its first institutional funding round in the coming months. Crucially, the existence of OH Mobility FZ LLC as an already incorporated UAE entity means the international holding structure that most Nigerian startups scramble to create at Series A is already in place.
The problem Keepaza is actually solving
To understand why Liasu moved with this kind of urgency, you need to spend a few minutes thinking about how financial transactions actually happen in Nigeria every single day.
Someone finishes a project and needs to be paid. They type their bank account number into a WhatsApp chat. It sits there in a message thread, visible, screenshotable, permanently stored in someone else’s phone.
These are not edge cases or unusual scenarios. This is the daily reality of commerce for millions of Nigerians.
What Keepaza builds instead
Keepaza is built on a simple but structurally important premise. Every Nigerian user gets a single verified username that resolves simultaneously to their bank account and their cryptocurrency wallet addresses across five blockchain networks.
Instead of sharing account numbers in chat threads, a user shares one clean link. Anyone who needs to pay them sees exactly what they need. No exposed account numbers. No wrong transfer errors.
Beyond the identity layer, Keepaza has introduced an invoicing tool that lets freelancers, vendors, and small business owners generate professional payment request links in under thirty seconds.
The structural distinction that matters for investors
Paystack, Flutterwave, and Moniepoint are transaction infrastructure. They process payments. Keepaza is identity infrastructure.
The platform is free for all users. Revenue flows through premium username registration, crypto swap commissions, and B2B API licensing for financial institutions.
Keepaza is live now at keepaza.com. Registration takes under sixty seconds and is free.
