Behind every successful business is a finance team trying to keep track of thousands of transactions. Yele Oyekola built Duplo to make that job easier. The company has since raised $13 million to help African businesses automate financial operations and gain better control of their money. In this edition of Meet the Founder, he discusses the road to building one of Africa's leading finance automation platforms.
Every thriving business has two faces. One is the face customers see, where payments are received, products are sold, and growth is measured. The other operates behind office doors, where invoices wait for approval, suppliers chase payments, accountants reconcile endless transactions, and finance teams spend hours trying to answer a deceptively simple question: Where did the money go?
That hidden side of business fascinated Yele Oyekola more than the one everyone else was trying to disrupt.
While much of Africa's fintech boom focused on making it easier to move money, he became obsessed with how businesses managed it after the payment had already been made.
That obsession would eventually become Duplo, a financial operations platform built to help African businesses gain control over the money flowing through them. It was an ambition shaped by years spent moving between finance, public policy and entrepreneurship, where he saw the same problem appear in different forms.
