The Problem Everyone Had Learned to Live With — Paystack and the $200 Million Fix for Broken Payments

Online payments in Nigeria used to fail often enough that businesses simply built workarounds instead of expecting them to work. Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi decided that was a solvable engineering problem, not a fact of life — and built Paystack to fix it properly.

This short story follows the company from Nigeria's first-ever Y Combinator acceptance to its 2020 acquisition by Stripe for a reported $200M+. Includes a "Behind the Story" section separating documented fact from narrative detail.

An 8-10 minute read about how boring, unglamorous infrastructure becomes a $200 million business.