Wennovation Hub Lost Its Office. The Work Went Home.

The business of helping entrepreneurs can itself come perilously close to running out of room. Wennovation Hub, one of Nigeria’s early startup support organisations, once lost its workspace and moved into a co-founder’s three-bedroom flat. In an interview with Independent, Oluwole Odetayo recalled a brush with bankruptcy and a team carrying on from his home. The organisation teaching other people how to build companies had acquired some uncomfortable teaching material of its own.

That episode is a useful entry point to Wennovation. The polished vocabulary of incubation can make entrepreneurship sound orderly: an idea arrives, receives mentoring and emerges ready for investment. The hub’s history is messier and more instructive. It concerns somewhere to work, people willing to help, and money that arrives at the right stage. Those are still central to the business it runs today.

A forwarded email, then a place to build

Co-founder Idris Ayodeji Bello traces the beginning to 2010. After a newspaper interview in Nigeria, he shared the article with friends back in Houston. Damilola Agboola forwarded it to Michael Oluwagbemi, who asked for an introduction. Bello dates the birth of Wennovation Hub to July that year. By early 2011, he was helping set it up remotely.

The distinction between an idea taking shape and an organisation opening its doors explains the two dates attached to Wennovation. Odetayo described a 2010 launch followed by operations in 2011. The company’s LinkedIn profile uses 2011. Its co-founders are Bello, Oluwagbemi, Agboola and Odetayo, with roots in the LoftyInc business network.

Agboola has described a progression from project development and business advice into incubation. His examples were refreshingly everyday: finding a house, finding a restaurant, helping technically capable students turn useful ideas into businesses. The intervention could include office facilities or help navigating company registration. Technology was the starting material; getting an enterprise organised was the work.

“There was a time we lost our space”

Oluwole Odetayo, recalling the team’s move into his flat

Odetayo’s account of working from home gives that ambition some friction. A support organisation has bills, premises and its own exposure to financial trouble. He presented the experience as something the team could pass on to entrepreneurs. The lesson was earned before it became part of the advice.

The money was there. The timing was wrong.

Another early problem was more specific than a shortage of investors. In a 2015 Innovation Village interview, Odetayo described venture capitalists looking for Nigerian deals while the hub’s young companies needed a different kind of backing. He said Wennovation convened the Lagos Angel Network because the available investment did not match the earliest stage of company building.

“We saw a gap for patient capital,” he said. That observation helps explain the organisation’s place in the market. An investor looking for an established opportunity and a founder still testing whether a business works can talk past each other. Odetayo’s account describes an attempt to create a bridge between those positions, rather than simply arranging more pitch meetings.

For a founder, the practical implication is to separate being introduced to investors from being prepared for them. Financial projections, a plausible route to customers and evidence of demand give an introduction something to work with. An accelerator’s address book is most useful when the company has a clear reason for asking for money.

The company behind the pitch deck

Wennovation now describes itself as a venture development company. It serves early-stage startups and growing small businesses, while also working for institutions commissioning innovation programmes. Its services run from shared offices and training to business diagnostics, investment preparation and programme delivery. The current contact page lists Lagos, Abuja and Ibadan.

That produces several different kinds of customer. A freelancer may need a desk and dependable connectivity. A founder may need help making financial assumptions defensible. An established small business may need operational advice. A donor or public institution may need a local organisation to recruit participants and run an entrepreneurship programme.

The commercial logic follows those differences. Workspace memberships, advisory services and institutional delivery sit alongside development-oriented training. Crunchbase describes a hybrid history, with nonprofit training and for-profit venture development. It is more useful to understand the distinct services being offered than to assume every person entering the building is buying the same accelerator package.

Its listed portfolio includes Crop2Cash, which works on farmers’ access to finance; Afrimash, an agricultural purchasing destination; Asusu, which digitises cooperative finance; and health insurer Reliance HMO. They illustrate the range of problems around the hub. A portfolio listing indicates a reported support relationship, and should not be read as a claim that Wennovation built each product or owns every listed company.

The current leadership page names Mustapha Abokede as CEO and venture lead. Alongside him are roles in finance, programme delivery, venture analysis, branding and business development. That staffing mix is consistent with the service: the work involves assessing and organising businesses as well as presenting them to the outside world.

What ₦3 million actually bought

A 2019 collaboration with First City Monument Bank makes the programme model tangible. According to FCMB’s account, 320 applications produced ten startups that pitched after two weeks of training and preparation. AgroBarn received ₦2 million and Agrico received ₦1 million in grants. The total was a prize allocation to two companies, not the operating budget for the entire programme.

The published call described an earlier task: testing ideas, finding initial customers and changing direction where necessary. Its problem areas included financing for smallholders, agricultural inputs, irrigation, storage and access to markets. That is a demanding brief. A convincing presentation cannot by itself move produce, repair distribution or make equipment affordable.

The point of incubation in that setting is to expose a proposed business to its constraints while there is still time to change it. An application can begin with a technical answer and discover that the buyer, delivery arrangement or price needs more work. The programme’s stated emphasis on validation makes that possibility part of the assignment.

Readers can borrow the sequence without borrowing the event: specify a customer’s problem, test the proposed answer, collect evidence and then decide what deserves more spending. A prize can finance the next experiment. Winning one is not the same as establishing that a business will survive.

Farming needs an organisation, too

Agriculture is a recurring thread, and it brings the limits of technology into view. In a 2016 ICT Update interview, Oluwagbemi argued that externally introduced agricultural advances often met poor adoption because of fit or cost. That diagnosis favours a close look at the people expected to use a product, and what they can reasonably pay.

It also explains why business support can look unglamorous. Wennovation describes a Heifer International engagement supporting Nimsy Agro Solar Concept through an organisational diagnostic, training and implementation of internal systems. The work covered areas including finance, sales, human resources and performance management. Those functions are easy to overlook when attention is fixed on the invention.

The Next Economy relationship with Crosswise Works adds a different audience: young people preparing for entrepreneurship and work. Wennovation dates that partnership to 2016. Its institutional activity also includes reported support for the first three editions of the NSIA Prize for Innovation with NSIA and LoftyInc. Here, the hub’s product is its ability to execute a programme and support the businesses inside it.

These projects put Wennovation between several worlds: founders, development organisations, corporate partners and investors. Its value depends on translating between their expectations. Participants want useful help; programme sponsors want delivery; investors want companies capable of putting capital to work. Keeping those demands aligned takes more than booking a training hall.

Choose the help that matches the problem

Wennovation shares territory with organisations such as CcHUB, which also offers incubation and venture support. Mentoring alone therefore makes a weak basis for choosing between them. Wennovation’s particular combination of agricultural programmes, institutional delivery and workplaces across several Nigerian cities is a more useful starting point for comparison.

Its application form is revealing. It asks about revenue models, profitability, funding history and documents such as business plans and projections. A prospective participant can use those questions as preparation: what does the company sell, what has already happened, and which obstacle should the hub help remove? A specific request gives both sides a better chance of choosing appropriate support.

The limits follow from the service. Mentoring is unlikely to rescue a product that customers cannot afford unless it changes the economics. A founder needing immediate cash should establish the terms of a particular programme before treating participation as financing. For someone needing only a quiet desk, the workspace itself may be the relevant purchase.

Recent public activity suggests that the organisation is still adding founder programmes to this mix. Its LinkedIn updates describe a first iDICE Startup Bridge Founders Lab cohort receiving 12 weeks of support. A July 2026 webinar promotion addressed participation in GITEX Nigeria. The tools have expanded since the early days, but the underlying job remains recognisable: help a founder decide what to do next, and make that next step possible.