The lights had a scheduling problem. Ojima Benjamin Ufaruna and Asehinde Oladipo were software professionals in Abuja, which meant work could stretch well beyond the polite boundaries of the day. When they reached home late and discovered that their prepaid electricity units had finished, the remedy still belonged to banking hours: travel to a distribution-company office, queue, pay, return. If the office had shut, so had the evening.
There is something almost comic about a prepaid meter that accepts electricity around the clock but accepts payment only while a clerk is present. Ufaruna did not find it comic for long. He had seen people gathered outside payment centers on weekends and knew the particular helplessness of arriving after closing. The problem was ordinary, repeatable and irritating enough that most people had learned to arrange their lives around it. To an engineer, that sort of resignation can resemble an unfinished specification.
Ufaruna and Oladipo had met at a technology development services company in Abuja. By then Ufaruna had already spent years close to the machinery. He earned a Sun Java credential in 2008, completed an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree at the Federal University of Technology Minna in 2009, worked as a lead software developer at Rom-Flex, and became chief technology officer at Emerging Platforms. His public project list is a tour through unglamorous but necessary software: a government certificate portal, a rural-finance information system, a professional-membership platform and an education app designed to work online and offline.
The software behind the simple button
The first idea for BuyPower was easy to explain: let people buy electricity online, from wherever they already happened to be. The implementation was less courteous. The founders approached utilities in 2015 and offered a useful bargain. BuyPower would absorb the cost of rolling out the payment service; the distribution companies only had to connect their systems.
“Only” is a dangerous word near infrastructure. The utilities' back ends needed work before a clean consumer product could sit on top. Ufaruna and his partners spent roughly half a year on cleanup. The customer would eventually see a website and a payment flow. The team saw integrations, old systems and the institutional work of persuading distribution companies that a young firm could carry transactions reliably.
The first circuit · 2015 to 2017
By April 2016, there was a product. A small email blast brought 50 customers by the end of the first day. The number is charming precisely because it is small enough to picture: 50 people, each with a meter number and a reason not to queue. Early customers returned because electricity is not a novelty purchase. When the units finish, the need renews itself. BuyPower was attaching itself to a habit that already existed and removing its least pleasant steps.
In March 2017, around Y Combinator Demo Day, BuyPower said it had reached 40 percent of Abuja's paid electricity market without marketing spend. The claim belonged to a young company speaking about its own traction, but the underlying mechanism is convincing. A payment tool for an urgent, recurring bill does not need to persuade people to desire electricity. It needs to be present at the exact moment their meter demands it.
California, without losing Abuja
Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch brought the founders to Silicon Valley only months after launch. Startup folklore likes to make an accelerator the beginning of a company. Here it was an accelerant, not an origin. The useful insight had been discovered at home; the awkward integrations had begun before California entered the sentence.
The company expanded beyond its first distribution partner. In 2017, Ufaruna stood with Kaduna Electric executives at the ribbon cutting for an online payment platform. The photograph is a delightful collision of worlds: suits, traditional dress, a BuyPower T-shirt, ceremonial ribbon and the old civic optimism of an oversized pair of scissors. Payment infrastructure rarely gets a party. On this occasion, it earned one.
Scale arrived through accumulation rather than theatrical reinvention. The service moved from Abuja Electricity Distribution Company coverage to nine of Nigeria's eleven electricity distribution companies by 2021. BuyPower added ways to transact through the web, apps and mobile channels. Its company description now extends to consumer energy bills, business vendor payments and an Energy Data Service intended to help lenders make decisions from payment behavior.
That expansion has a consistent logic. A record of electricity purchases is not merely a stack of receipts. It can show rhythm: how often a household or small company buys power, how much it spends and whether the pattern is steady. In a market where formal credit histories may be thin, an everyday payment can become a piece of financial evidence. The electricity token opens the door; the transaction history may explain what happens next.
A million small absences
At BuyPower's fifth anniversary in 2021, Ufaruna and Oladipo looked back on a company that had begun from their pockets, endured negative responses from funders and grown from two people to more than 60 staff. Ufaruna mentioned corporate partners, traffic and acquisition offers. Yet the milestone he described most personally was crossing one million users. It “struck a chord,” he said.
One million is too large to see, so it helps to count what disappeared: a hurried trip before closing, cash carried to an office, a weekend queue, a dark room waiting for Monday. Software businesses often measure what happens inside the product. BuyPower's useful measure was what no longer had to happen outside it.
His answers from that anniversary are revealing in another way. He talks about empathy more readily than novelty. Building products, in his formulation, means remembering the customer who cannot buy units when the meter empties. The origin story remains a test case. A new feature is useful if it keeps someone else from repeating the founders' old inconvenience.
He also distributes credit. When BuyPower received a Nigerian power-sector fintech innovation award in 2022, his public note thanked the team. When he later shared a profile about his own journey, he corrected the frame himself: the story reflected a collective effort, he wrote, and customer trust remained the fuel for the mission. Founder profiles naturally place one person in the foreground. Ufaruna keeps pointing toward the group photograph.
The operator's widening frame
Ufaruna's career can be read as a steady widening of responsibility. The developer makes a system work. The CTO makes a technical organization work. The founder must make customers, institutions, capital and a team work together, often while the meter is figuratively counting down. His 2024 Venture Valley conversation revisited that transition: an unexpected route into entrepreneurship, difficult fundraising, Y Combinator and the discipline of customer-led growth.
That progression also explains why his story resists the tidy myth of a lone flash of inspiration. The late-night outage supplied the question, but his earlier work supplied a vocabulary for answering it. Years spent building portals and information systems taught him that software does not float above institutions. It lives inside rules, databases, approval chains and the habits of the people expected to use it. BuyPower needed a founder who could notice the irritation at the front door while remaining patient with the pipes behind the wall.
The engineer has not vanished inside the executive. BuyPower's strategy still resembles an integration diagram. Start with the local problem. Understand the old system underneath it. Build the bridge. Add the adjacent service only when the original customer relationship makes it plausible. It is a less romantic approach than disruption by proclamation, and considerably easier to recognize in daily life.
The current ambition is wider than the electricity queue: simplify bill payments across Africa and help small businesses pay and manage their financial lives. Ambition can become fog when the nouns grow too large. Ufaruna's version keeps returning to concrete verbs - pay, connect, integrate, buy, keep the lights on.
There will always be founders searching for an untouched market. BuyPower found a touched-too-often market: the same queue, the same closing time, the same failing patience. Its opening was not a hidden desire but a public nuisance. Everyone could see it. The trick was to stop accepting it as scenery.
Some companies promise to change how people imagine the future. This one began by changing what happened after a long workday. The meter ran dry. The office was closed. An engineer looked at the darkness and, instead of waiting for morning, found a specification.