YesPress Profile • Founder & Executive
The recovering banker who out-engineered the engineers - and built a 110-person AI firm to prove it.
"Talent is everywhere. Geography is just a hiring excuse."
Chike Agbai spent almost twenty years telling other people's stories. Oracle's mergers. Salesforce's acquisitions. Dell's leveraged buyouts. As a Wall Street investment banker covering enterprise software, he sat at the table while over $100 billion in deals changed hands - and watched, with a front-row seat, as the smartest companies on the planet repeatedly ran out of engineers.
That detail stuck. Not the deal volume. Not the marquee clients. The gap between what technology could do and the human capacity to build it. He kept asking the same question: if companies with unlimited resources can't consistently hire great developers, what does that mean for everyone else?
In 2016, he stopped asking and started building. Azumo launched in San Francisco with Twitter as its first client - which is either a statement about Chike's network or a statement about how badly even Twitter needed reliable engineering help. Probably both.
The Origin
The emotional root of Chike's entrepreneurship doesn't trace back to Stanford or Wall Street. It traces to his grandfather, who packed up Louisiana in the 1930s and drove west to Los Angeles to take a job at Shell Oil. That one act of migration - the bet on movement, on possibility, on showing up somewhere new and earning a place - is the story Chike carries into Azumo's model of hiring across borders, refusing to let geography be a ceiling.
The pitch at Azumo is plain: exceptional developers exist everywhere. Latin America is full of them. They understand U.S. time zones, they ship clean code, and they don't need a San Francisco zip code to do it. What they need is a company that treats them like owners rather than contractors - which is exactly what Azumo does, offering equity to every employee at a time when most staffing firms don't even offer health benefits.
By the time Azumo hit the $9.6 million revenue mark, Chike had built something unusual in the services business: a firm clients don't leave. The average customer relationship stretches past three years. Renewals grow at 150% annually. The Clutch rating has held at 4.9 stars across more than a hundred clients. In a category known for churn, that kind of retention is either a cult following or evidence that the model genuinely works. Given the results, it's probably both.
"I founded Azumo on the conviction that talent is everywhere - and that the technology revolution would create real opportunities for companies that could find it."- Chike Agbai, Azumo Founder Letter
The Wall Street years left a distinct mark on how he runs the company. Investment bankers live in spreadsheets and slide decks, but they also live in client relationships, in reading a room, in translating complicated technical realities into decisions. Azumo runs on transparency - hourly billing, detailed time tracking, full accountability. No black boxes. The same discipline that made him effective in M&A advisory made him effective at building a services business people trust.
He describes his management philosophy in one borrowed line: hire smart, motivated people and give them the space to soar. He credits Oprah Winfrey with that formulation. It's a strange citation for a tech CEO, but Chike has never pretended to be a conventional founder. He studied Economics at Stanford, not Computer Science. He knows how to read a balance sheet better than a codebase. That distance from engineering - and his comfort with it - is part of what makes Azumo legible to the executives who hire them. He speaks their language.
The Model
Azumo positions itself in a deliberate gap: between freelance marketplaces that treat developers as interchangeable commodities, and old-school consulting firms that require bodies in conference rooms. Neither extreme serves the clients Chike wants to work with. So Azumo offers stability, continuity, and a distributed team that behaves like an extension of your own engineering department - without the downtown San Francisco rent.
The company's focus on AI and machine learning arrived before the rest of the market caught up. Azumo was building chatbots and voice applications in 2016 and 2017, when Alexa skills and conversational interfaces were still a fringe experiment. By 2025, with 40% of their active projects in manufacturing AI, 25% in financial services, and 15% in healthcare, they had the track record to match the moment. The market came to Azumo. Azumo had been waiting.
Talent is everywhere.
Hire smart, motivated people and give them the space to soar.
We believe in honesty, education, and freedom - the three pillars that make Azumo different.