By thothub22@gmail.com 
When TLcom Capital put $1 million into Okra in April 2020, the round stood out for two reasons. First, Okra was still very early. Second, TLcom was not known at the time for making many early-stage fintech bets. TechCrunch described TLcom as a $71 million Africa-focused VC firm that rarely invested in early-stage companies or fintech, which immediately made the pre-seed round look unusual.
That is why the founders’ backgrounds matter so much here. The easiest way to understand TLcom’s early conviction is not to look only at the size of the round. It is to look at who was building the company. Okra was founded in June 2019 by Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside, and from the beginning the company positioned itself as a financial infrastructure play, not just another payments startup. It called itself a super-connector API that lets people connect African bank accounts directly to third-party applications, starting in Nigeria.
TLcom was already looking for infrastructure, not another me-too fintech
Part of the answer starts with TLcom’s own strategy. In the TechCrunch report, Maurizio Caio was described as steering the firm more toward infrastructure-oriented tech companies and away from more commoditized payments and lending startups. That makes Okra a much better fit than it might first appear. The company was not trying to compete directly with the most crowded consumer fintech categories. It was building infrastructure that other fintechs and banks could plug into.
That same point shows up across the other coverage too. Africa Global Funds said Okra’s launch product created a secure portal for exchanging real-time financial information between customers, applications, and banks. The article also said developers and organizations in Africa did not have easy access to real-time banking data, which created friction around onboarding and verification. In other words, Okra was tackling a deep ecosystem problem, not just adding another front-end financial app to the market.
So before you even get to the founders’ CVs, the company was already aligned with the kind of thesis TLcom wanted to pursue. The firm saw a service that could accelerate the growth of fintech more broadly across the continent because other companies could build on top of it. Andreata Muforo said exactly that in TechCrunch, calling Okra a service other fintechs could plug into and describing that as “a big hook.”
Fara Ashiru Jituboh’s CV made the pitch much easier to believe
If Okra’s product thesis explained the market opportunity, Fara Ashiru Jituboh’s résumé helped explain why investors believed the team could actually build it. TechCrunch said she came into the CEO role with a software engineering background, grew up and studied computer science in North Carolina, and had worked at JP Morgan Chase and Fidelity Investments before moving into startups.
Other coverage adds even more weight to that profile. Talented Women Network says Fara earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, had mastered over 20 programming languages, and had worked with JP Morgan Chase, Fidelity Investments, Daimler Mercedes Benz, and Canva before founding Okra. Ventureburn also repeated Andreata Muforo’s comment that she knew over 20 programming languages and had worked with multiple Fortune 500 companies.
That kind of background matters a lot at pre-seed. TLcom was not just looking at a slide deck. It was looking at a founder with serious engineering credibility and real exposure to financial services systems. When Muforo told TechCrunch that the firm liked the fact that Fara was a technical founder, that was not a throwaway compliment. It was a direct clue to why the investment happened. A company trying to build API infrastructure for banks and fintech apps becomes much more believable when the person leading it has both software depth and prior finance experience.
There is also a strong founder-market-fit element here. TechCrunch said Fara returned to Nigeria and saw firsthand that the market lacked a reliable way to connect bank accounts directly to applications. She said the opportunity became obvious when fintech CEOs and CTOs kept struggling with the same use case. That suggests she was not chasing a generic global trend. She was responding to a specific infrastructure gap she had seen up close.
David Peterside brought operating and market-side depth
The keyword focus often leans more heavily toward Fara, but David Peterside is an important part of the story too. Africa Global Funds said David Peterside came from UCML Capital and Fashion Map, while Crowdfund Insider identified him as Co-Founder and COO. That kind of background complemented Fara’s more technical profile by adding operating and market-side experience to the founding team.
His comments also help explain how the team thought about the product. In Crowdfund Insider, Peterside said businesses had long struggled with tasks like budgeting, internal reconciliations, and credit assessments, and that Okra wanted to make those processes more seamless and less painful for clients. That sounds less like hype and more like a founder who understood the boring but important workflows financial infrastructure can improve.
That matters because the best early teams are rarely one-dimensional. Fara brought deep technical credibility. David added operating perspective and a clearer view of how businesses would use the product in practice. Together, they looked more balanced than a team that only knew how to build or only knew how to sell. This is an inference from the backgrounds and roles described in the reporting, but it is a grounded one.
The founders’ CVs matched the problem Okra was trying to solve
The strongest version of the story is not that the founders had impressive résumés in general. It is that their experience lined up directly with the problem Okra was solving. TechCrunch compared Okra to Plaid in the sense that it was building a platform that connected accounts and financial data to applications as a revenue-generating product. For that kind of business, technical architecture matters, bank integrations matter, and trust matters. A weak team would have struggled to make that case early.
The company also showed signs of traction that made the founders’ backgrounds look even more relevant. TechCrunch reported that Okra had already built a client list including Carbon, Axa Mansard, Branch, and Renmoney. Africa Global Funds added that the company had connected with all of Nigeria’s commercial banks and clients including AIICO Insurance Plc, Travelstart, Bamboo, Renmoney, and Swipe (YC). Those details suggest the team was not only credible on paper. They were already converting that credibility into real partnerships and usage.
That traction also arrived quickly. Africa Global Funds said Okra had the capacity to onboard new clients in under 24 hours and had seen a 175% rise in demand since March 2020 as more companies digitized their services during the COVID-19 period. For a pre-seed company, that kind of momentum makes an investor’s early conviction easier to defend.
Why TLcom’s early bet makes more sense once you look at the founders
So why did TLcom move early? The clearest answer is that Okra was not a random fintech startup with an ambitious story. It was an infrastructure company in a market that badly needed infrastructure, built by founders whose backgrounds matched the challenge unusually well. Fara Ashiru Jituboh brought software engineering depth, finance experience, startup exposure, and technical-founder credibility. David Peterside brought operating experience and a sharper understanding of business pain points. Together, they gave TLcom a team that looked capable of building something foundational, not just fashionable.
That is really what the founders’ CVs explain. They show why TLcom could justify making a rare early-stage fintech investment. The fund was not simply backing two smart people. It was backing a combination of technical skill, market understanding, and a product thesis that fit its infrastructure-focused strategy at exactly th