Odunayo Eweniyi: The "Tech Bro" Who Built Nigeria's Biggest Savings Platform

It’s the end of 2015. 

A woman online posts photos of her kolo, the small wooden savings box Nigerians have used for generations. For a whole year she had been dropping in ₦1,000 a day and telling no one. 

When she finally broke it open, there was about ₦365,000 inside. 

The post went viral.

In a Lagos startup's group chat, one of the founders, Josh Chibueze, dropped the link to the post with a simple question; what if we built the digital version of that? No box to break, just a habit anyone with a phone could keep.

• That question became the reason millions of Nigerians now save the way they do
• That question became PiggyVest
• That question became the company that paid out over ₦3 trillion to Nigerians

In April 2026, PiggyVest marked its first decade with a gala in Lagos.

The woman who ran the operation behind it all is Odunayo Eweniyi, co-founder and COO of  PiggyVest.

Eweniyi did not set out to build an app. She set out to make financial discipline easy, and here’s her story.

PushCV - The Starting Point for Odunayo Eweniyi

Born in Abeokuta to two university professors, Eweniyi’s childhood home was the kind where books were everywhere.

For a while Eweniyi wanted to study medicine. "I wanted to be a doctor," she said in a previous release, "but I feel there’s a certain level of empathy you need... and I didn’t have that."

When the JAMB form came, she opted for Computer Engineering instead.

Eweniyi finished top of her class at Covenant University with a first class honor. Two weeks after graduation, on her way back from a job interview, a former classmate named Somto Ifezue asked her to join his startup.

She said yes.

That startup was PushCV, a recruitment platform - the company that would later bankroll PiggyVest. 

Building PiggyVest from Scratch

PiggyVest did not take off just like that. It crawled in its early stages.

Initially launched as Piggybank.ng in April 2016, the company only had around 700 users with only a few hundred of them active, and roughly ₦21 million saved between all of them. 

The big turnaround for PiggyVest came on December 31, the day early users were finally allowed to withdraw without penalty. People got their savings back with interest on top, and they did what Nigerians do when something actually works…

…they posted about it. 

The screenshots spread, and word of mouth reviews for PiggyVest did what no ad budget could.

From there PiggyVest soared:

• A $1.1 million seed round in 2018
• The rebrand to PiggyVest
• Getting a microfinance bank license
• Getting an SEC license and mobile money license, so the money sat on regulated rails

And at some point they pulled the entire product offline for three months to fix security properly, a frightening call for a young startup – and exactly the kind of call Eweniyi is known for making.

Eweniyi is Putting Financial Power in the Hands of Everyone

The money-and-power idea was never just about an app.

In 2020, Eweniyi co-founded the Feminist Coalition with twelve other Nigerian women.

Her framing was; she had been thinking about what separated the people at the top of the food chain from everyone else, and it came down to two things, money and power.

The people at the top tended to have both.

Months later, when the #EndSARS protests swept the country in 2020, the Coalition became one of its most trusted engines. 

They organised relief, medical aid, legal aid, and food for protesters, and they accounted for every naira in public while they did it. When their usual payment channels were frozen, they kept using Bitcoin rather than stop.

Odunayo Eweniyi brought the same idea back to her day job. She co-founded FirstCheck Africa, an angel fund that writes some of the earliest cheques into startups with at least one woman founder.

Life as the COO of PiggyVest

For all of that, Odunayo Eweniyi is not quite who you would picture. 

On Twitter she goes by "Tech Bro" , "Demotivational Speaker," and her timeline is mostly memes and strong opinions about Lewis Hamilton. 😅

She’s also a homebody who would rather be in with her dog and a novel than at a party.

And inside the company, Eweniyi is the pessimist. "I'm usually the one that questions everything," she said in a recent release. "I'm a self-professed pessimist." 

It sounds like a flaw until you notice what she’s built. A person who plans for the worst is exactly the person you want building a cushion against it.

The Takeaway: Starting With Your Box

There is a lesson in here for anyone with an idea waiting for permission to chase it. 

PiggyVest did not begin with a grand plan or a perfect deck. It began with one observed problem, a viral box of money, and a small team that chose to do something about it instead of waiting.

PiggyVest is one of hundreds of products built by Africans, for Africa, and behind every one of them is a founder who started with nothing but a question.

Revealing those products, and the people behind them, is what Liners is for. The Builders is where we tell their stories.

So start with your box today.

As Eweniyi puts it: aim very high, work very hard, care very deeply.