About Gbenro

I've spent 14 years building technology companies across Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya — mostly at the intersection of infrastructure, distribution, and emerging-market consumer behaviour.

My current work is at Octamile, where we're building the API and infrastructure layer that lets any business embed insurance into their product. The thesis is simple: insurance penetration in Africa is stuck at under 3% not because people don't need it, but because the distribution infrastructure doesn't exist. We're building it.

I started in insurance as a student — BSc Insurance at the University of Lagos, CIIN membership — before joining Jumia Nigeria as part of the founding team. That experience taught me that the most interesting opportunities in African tech are usually infrastructure problems disguised as product problems.

AutoGenius, the company I co-founded in 2014, was my first attempt to fix Nigerian motor insurance distribution. It was the right problem, but too early and undercapitalised. Octamile is the second attempt, built with a decade more context.

Between AutoGenius and Octamile, I ran three other companies — Efritin, Cheki, and OList — each teaching a different lesson in what it takes to build, turn around, and scale a consumer internet business in Nigeria. OList was the biggest: I joined as MD and built it to over 1M seller accounts and 4M monthly users before handing it over.

I'm a researcher as much as an operator. I care about the structural questions underneath the product decisions: how does insurance actually work as a financial system? What are the compounding effects of informal risk-sharing at scale? How does the GDP-insurance relationship evolve as a middle class forms? I write about these questions. I try to build towards the answers.