Ojima Ufaruna and the business of fewer steps

A ribbon is an odd accessory for a software launch. There is nothing in a payment interface that requires scissors. Yet there stands Ojima Benjamin Ufaruna in a black BuyPower T-shirt, surrounded by officials, with a green ribbon stretched across the foreground. In Kaduna, on December 4, 2017, a way to buy electricity online had become an occasion worth gathering for. The ceremony gave a very physical form to a rather useful disappearance: the trip to a payment office.

Ufaruna was there to explain what his company had built with Kaduna Electric. Prepaid customers would be able to obtain energy tokens from home or work, around the clock. He talked about handling payment traffic and removing repetition. A founder can reveal quite a lot in the things he chooses to celebrate. Here, the attraction was fewer things to do.

The engineer before the electricity bill

Before BuyPower, Ufaruna worked on the less visible parts of software: applications, databases and the connections that let one service talk to another. He studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Federal University of Technology Minna. His professional background includes lead development at Rom-Flex and software-team supervision at Emerging Platforms. Those jobs place the eventual CEO close to the work of making a product function, well before the work of explaining it to investors.

His projects were varied. They included commerce, education and administrative systems. PayPorte and NOUN iLearn appear among the applications associated with his development career. His own project history also includes a professional-membership portal with registration, approvals, renewals and payment integration. These are tasks with users who have somewhere else to be. A portal can have a perfectly respectable feature list and still waste an afternoon.

There is a clue to his later business in that kind of experience. An engineer working on institutional software must consider the person entering information and the organization processing it. A payment service has the same double obligation. The customer wants an answer quickly; the institution needs the transaction to fit its systems. Convenience at one end requires cooperation at the other.

His credentials include a Sun Certified Java Programmer qualification issued in 2008 and a Scrum Master certification issued in 2015. The dates belong to an apprenticeship in building and organizing software. They also put some distance between Ufaruna and the familiar founder story in which an idea arrives first and the technical knowledge is acquired later. He already had a trade.

Closing time was part of the problem

BuyPower began with a frustration Ufaruna shared with his co-founder, Asehinde Oladipo. Working late could mean reaching home after their prepaid electricity units had run out. The physical payment centers were closed. Buying more units had to wait. An ordinary bill had acquired the power to dictate the evening.

The absurdity lay in the timing. Software engineers could work beyond office hours; the means of paying for electricity kept a stricter diary. The founders encountered a problem they could describe without a pitch deck. Someone wanted to pay. The available channel would not accept the payment at that hour.

The company launched in 2016. Its promise was legible: buy electricity without making the errand. That clarity did not make implementation automatic. Connecting to distribution companies meant winning institutional confidence as well as writing code. The customer might experience one short transaction, while several organizations had to agree on how that transaction would travel.

The shorter errand: a simplified view of a prepaid electricity purchase.

When customers arrive before the money

BuyPower joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 batch. It is tempting to read that credential backwards, as though acceptance explained why the business existed. Ufaruna’s account puts the pressure elsewhere. The company had already attracted demand and needed money to keep growing.

He later described the fundraising situation with the phrase “we were out of options for raising capital.” Organic growth was running ahead of the resources available to support it. That is an awkward version of success: customers provide evidence that the service is useful, while their arrival creates more work than the founders can finance from their own pockets.

The accelerator offered capital and access to people who had encountered later stages of the same journey. Ufaruna has emphasized the need for support as a company moves through successive phases. That observation has a practical modesty. Knowing how to build the first working product does not mean knowing everything required to run the organization that grows around it.

“We were out of options for raising capital.”Ojima Ufaruna, reflecting on BuyPower’s application to Y Combinator

For an engineer becoming a chief executive, this is a consequential change in the job. Code has rules that can be tested. A funding decision involves other people’s timing, appetite and judgment. Demand can be real even when an investor declines. Ufaruna’s story makes room for both the evidence of growth and the discomfort of needing someone else to believe it.

A ribbon for the missing queue

By the end of 2017, the Kaduna launch gave Ufaruna another audience: the utility and its customers. He described a platform designed after examining difficulties in existing online payment services. His explanation included a plain promise: “we have eliminated complex repetitive steps.” It is a small sentence to put beside a ceremonial ribbon, and a useful one.

Repetition is easy for a business to overlook. A form that takes a little longer, a number entered twice, an unnecessary visit: each can seem minor when considered once. A utility customer encounters the process again when the next purchase comes due. Every extra instruction gets another performance. Removing a step is a benefit that renews itself.

The photograph catches that meeting between institutional ceremony and everyday use. There are formal clothes, a microphone, a company T-shirt and the ribbon. The future customer’s part in the scene is largely invisible: remaining at home. BuyPower’s service would be judged after the speeches, when someone actually needed a token.

There is also a limit built into the promise. A payment company can make buying units easier; electricity distribution remains the utility’s work. Keeping those responsibilities clear helps explain Ufaruna’s particular contribution. His company works on the transaction between the household and an existing system, where delays can be both familiar and surprisingly persistent.

The return visit matters

A recurring bill gives a product repeated chances to be useful. BuyPower’s app history shows how much of that usefulness lives in small changes. Its listed features include saved facilities, repeat purchases, downloadable payment records and reminders. A customer can name a meter, making several facilities easier to distinguish. These are the details that become important after the novelty of paying online has worn off.

A receipt answers a different question from a successful checkout. The checkout says the purchase happened; the record helps the customer return to it later. A repeat-purchase button recognizes that a familiar task need not be reconstructed from the beginning. Such features make an everyday product more intelligible over time.

The wider product range includes airtime, data and television subscriptions. These purchases have something in common with the original electricity errand: customers already understand why they need them. The challenge is making the transaction dependable and easy to repeat. An elaborate explanation of the future has limited value to someone trying to finish a bill.

In its 2021 review, BuyPower described serving more than two million Nigerians, improving support and marking its fifth anniversary by visiting loyal customers. It also introduced an electricity gifting page. That last detail has a certain charm. A utility payment, once a tedious personal obligation, could become something you sent to another person.

A CEO who keeps the team in the sentence

Ufaruna’s public comments return to the people doing the work. When BuyPower received a Nigerian power-sector fintech innovation award in 2022, he thanked the team. When sharing a profile of his own career, he emphasized collective effort. The response is consistent with a service whose success requires developers, utility partners and support staff to keep their parts connected.

His public description of his interests is equally direct: technology applied to local problems in Africa. That statement gives the career a geographical center. Abuja supplied the original inconvenience and the working relationships around it. The ambition can widen while the question remains recognizable: what is taking people too much effort to do?

In August 2024, he appeared on Venture Valley for a conversation about entrepreneurship, raising capital, Y Combinator and customer-led growth. The path from engineer to founder had become something he could discuss with other builders. It had required learning the business side alongside the technical work.

BuyPower’s current company description reaches beyond household energy payments to international vendor payments for businesses and an Energy Data Service for lenders. These are broader responsibilities than delivering a prepaid token. They extend the company’s interest in the payments and records that accumulate around ordinary economic life.

For Ufaruna, the most revealing image may still be that ribbon in Kaduna. A digital service needed people to gather, institutions to cooperate and a founder to explain himself before customers could enjoy the convenience of doing less. The scissors were ceremonial. The steps he wanted to remove were quite real.