BuyPower and the Death of the Electricity Queue

In Nigeria, buying electricity used to mean surrendering an afternoon. You drove to the distribution company's office, joined a line that moved like syrup, and hoped you got to the window before the doors shut. Miss the cutoff on a Friday and you could be sitting in the dark until Monday. BuyPower's founders knew that feeling intimately - and it annoyed them enough to build a company around it.

Founded in 2016 in Abuja by Ojima Benjamin Ufaruna and Asehinde Oladipo, BuyPower is, at its plainest, a bill-payment platform. You enter your meter number, pay, and receive a token to punch into your prepaid meter. The lights come on. No queue, no office hours, no drive. It is the kind of product that sounds too simple to be a business until you realize how many people were quietly losing hours every month to the old way.

The founders met while working at a technology services company in the capital. The idea for BuyPower came less from a whiteboard than from lived irritation. Within five months of launching buypower.ng, the company had enough traction to earn a spot in Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch - making it the first company from Northern Nigeria to be funded by the accelerator.

That geography is worth pausing on. Nigeria's startup story is usually told through Lagos, the coastal commercial capital where most of the country's venture money and press attention pool. BuyPower came out of Abuja, the inland administrative capital, and Ufaruna has spoken about what it meant to prove that a serious, YC-backed company could be built outside the usual map. The company didn't relocate to chase the scene; it stayed close to the customers whose queues it was trying to end.

01 / THE PRODUCTIt sells the token, not the power

Here is the distinction that matters, and the one BuyPower is careful to make itself: it does not supply electricity. The distribution companies do that. BuyPower supplies the token - the string of digits that credits your prepaid meter. That sounds like a technicality, but it is the whole shape of the business. BuyPower doesn't own generators or wires. It owns the checkout.

To make that checkout work everywhere, BuyPower wired itself into the utilities directly, often upgrading creaky backend infrastructure along the way. Today it connects to all the major Nigerian distribution companies - AEDC, JED, EKEDC, IBEDC, IKEDC, EEDC, KAEDCO, KEDCO and PHED - so a customer never has to care which DisCo they belong to. Enter the meter number and the app figures out the rest.

The mobile apps, launched for iOS and Android, layered on the conveniences that keep people from drifting back to the counter: biometric login, saved meters, a "Buy Again" button for repeat purchases, scheduled payments and reminders, downloadable receipts and utility bills, meter-consumption tracking, and even a dark mode for the low-light moments when you're topping up at night. Small touches, but they are the reason the app stays on the home screen.

There is also a quieter product decision baked in here: BuyPower designed for how power is actually bought in Nigeria, which is often in small amounts, at odd hours, under intermittent supply. The consumption tracker and PDF utility bills aren't garnish - they answer the very real question of "where did my units go?" for households watching every naira. Building for a low-trust, low-bandwidth context means the boring reliability of a receipt and a saved meter number does more work than any splashy feature.

"If they are closed you have to stay in darkness till Monday when they open." - Benjamin Ufaruna, on the problem BuyPower set out to erase.

02 / THE CUSTOMERSWho actually uses it

BuyPower's users are ordinary Nigerian households and small businesses - anyone with a meter and a reason not to spend a morning in a queue. Early on, the concentration was striking: within its first year the platform reportedly accounted for around 40% of paid electricity in Abuja, split roughly half in the city and a third in the surrounding suburbs. On its very first day of operation, it picked up about 50 customers. That was enough of a signal to chase.

Since then the base has spread nationwide and grown into the hundreds of thousands of paying customers. The company has described itself as cash-flow positive - a phrase you don't hear often enough in African fintech, where growth is frequently financed rather than earned. BuyPower earned it by being the thing people needed on a Sunday night.

03 / THE MODELMoney in the margins of a bill

BuyPower makes money the way good payment plumbing does - quietly, on volume. It takes a percentage of each electricity purchase plus a small per-transaction fee inside its utility integrations. As early as 2017 it was reporting around $1 million in monthly revenue. By 2024, external trackers put annual revenue near $20.6 million, up from about $17.3 million mid-year, on a team of roughly 138 people.

The unit economics are almost aggressively unromantic, and that is the point. A percentage here, a flat fee there, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of customers who each buy power several times a month, adds up to a real business without any single transaction feeling expensive to the person paying. It is the opposite of the high-burn, subsidize-to-grow playbook - closer to a toll booth on a road people were always going to travel.

Crucially, the company never leaned on a stack of ever-larger venture rounds. Public records point to a modest seed of roughly $120,000 to $130,000 around its YC year, and not much visible fundraising since. In 2022 it signed a reported multimillion-dollar power-financing partnership with the lender Aella, aimed at helping customers finance their electricity purchases - a nod to how many Nigerians buy power in small, frequent bits rather than big monthly lumps.

04 / THE EDGEWhy it's hard to copy

Plenty of Nigerian apps will sell you an electricity token - PayPaddi, PowerPlug, and the big super-apps and payment rails like Flutterwave, Paga, Quickteller, OPay and Palmpay among them, alongside the DisCos' own channels. So what keeps BuyPower relevant? Two things that don't photograph well: depth and focus.

Depth is the years spent integrating with every major DisCo and nursing their aging systems into something reliable. That is unglamorous, slow work, and it is exactly the kind of moat that a flashier competitor can't sprint past. Focus is the discipline of being, first and foremost, the place you go to keep your lights on - then adding airtime, data and TV as natural neighbors rather than a scattershot super-app land grab.

There's a reliability angle too. When you're buying electricity at 10 p.m. because the meter just hit zero, you don't want an app that occasionally fails to deliver the token or leaves you unsure whether your payment went through. A token that doesn't arrive isn't a minor bug - it's a dark house. Years of handling exactly that transaction, at volume, is a kind of institutional memory that a new entrant has to earn the hard way. The competitors listed above are formidable, but most of them treat electricity as one tile in a grid of services; for BuyPower it was the founding obsession.

05 / THE NEXT BETYour light bill as a credit signal

The most interesting thing BuyPower is building may not be a payment feature at all. Sitting underneath all those transactions is a record of who pays for power, how much, and how regularly - a fairly honest proxy for the financial health of a household or small business. BuyPower's Energy Data Service aims to turn that history into a signal that can inform lending decisions, the kind of alternative credit data that is scarce and valuable in markets where formal credit histories are thin.

It's a natural extension of the mission the company states plainly: simplify bill payments and help African small and medium businesses prioritize their financial health. Payments got people in the door. Data may be what lets BuyPower do something larger without abandoning the boring, dependable thing that made it work in the first place.

The Aella partnership hints at where this goes. If BuyPower can see that a customer reliably buys power every ten days, it can reasonably offer to spot them a token when cash is tight and settle up later - a small, well-collateralized loan against a very predictable need. Electricity is one of the few things people will always pay for, which makes energy-payment history unusually good collateral for the kind of micro-credit that formal banks in the region have struggled to underwrite.

Where does it fit in the market? Somewhere between a utility and a fintech - closer to the everyday plumbing of Nigerian life than to the headline-grabbing end of the sector. It is not trying to reinvent money. It is trying to make sure that paying for electricity never again costs you a Saturday. On the evidence of its revenue and its staying power, that has turned out to be a business worth building.