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Rotimi Thomas built Sun-Fi, one of Nigeria's biggest financing company for solar panels. Here's the story, and the why.
On a rooftop in Lagos, a crew bolts down the last solar panel under a punishing sun. The customer walks the installer to the gate, shakes his hand, and asks the only question on his mind.
"Oga, this thing... I fit pay small-small?"
That question followed Rotimi Thomas from roof to roof.
Different house, different customer, same words. People wanted the sun, but they could not pay for it in one lump sum. And every time the answer was no, he watched a sale go out the door.
Most solar installers shrugged at that question...but Rotimi Thomas, he soon built his life around it.
Rotimi Thomas did not come up through solar. He came up through "spreadsheets."
That CV buys a soft life anywhere on earth. But for Thomas, he carried it back to Nigeria to fight the one enemy the country never beats: darkness.
Around 2018, Rotimi Thomas co-founded Aspire Power Solutions and started putting panels on roofs. More than 500 of them.
The demand was A LOT.
Customers wanted to pay over time, but Aspire had no way to let them.
Rotimi took the problem to the banks.
If a customer could not pay upfront...surely a bank could lend the money?
The banks said no. Not from greed, but from fear of a thing they could not understand. A panel on a roof is not a car or a house. They could not value it nor guess if it'd still be running in three years.
Simply put, banks couldn't dash out credit to customers... when they didn't understand the technical risks involved.
Customers wanted solar - providers could install solar - banks held the money.
Yet, none of the three could speak to the other two.
Rotimi had spent a whole career as a translator between energy and money. And now...he was standing in the exact spot where the gap could be closed.
In 2021, Aspire became SunFi.
Rotimi Thomas brought in two builders to do it right: Tomiwa Igun as COO and Olaoluwa Faniyi as CTO.
SunFi would sell the missing piece: trust between three parties who could not read each other.
Picture a handshake with three hands. The customer who wants light and can pay monthly. The provider who can install but cannot finance. The bank with capital but no way to judge the risk. SunFi stands in the middle and makes the deal make sense to all three at once.
In Rotimi's own words: "We're the guys in the middle of all this."
For the person using the solar panels, it felt like a dream come true;
By Rotimi's estimate, fewer than 2% of Nigerians could buy a solar system in full payment outright. The other 98 were never anti-solar. They were just never handed a door they could walk through.
SunFi built the door.
SunFi takes the risk everyone else ran from.
It scores the credit, owns the technical side, and runs portals where providers track their business and investors watch where every Naira goes.
Since 2022, SunFi has deployed over 1,500 solar systems and manages around 4MW of assets. Each system reaches roughly 30 people a year, which puts more than 45,000 lives under cleaner, cheaper power every year. Solar providers who plug into Sunfi's financing have more than doubled their sales.
SunFi does not only help the family that wanted light. It makes solar distributors sell more solar panels. It also partnered with big names like Arnergy instead of fighting them, turning rivals into a distribution network.
Some clean-energy founders hide behind the cause. Wave the climate flag, talk about the planet, expect the money to follow because the mission is noble. Rotimi Thomas disagrees.
"Climate tech is not going to get a free pass," he says. Founders still have to post real commercial returns. He calls it a marathon, not a sprint, and he is honest that a business like his runs on debt and patience.
When SunFi raised its $2.325 million seed in 2023, led by Factor[e] and Sterling-backed SCM Capital, Rotimi Thomas spent more time watching the portfolio, managing risk, holding investors close when the months turn hard.
Rotimi Thomas took a single question on a rooftop and turned it into power for 45,000 lives.
Somewhere tonight in Nigeria, the generators are coming on, and someone will ask their own version of "I fit pay small-small?" When they build the answer, we at Liners plan to find them first.
Chief Content Editor
Adepeju Toromade is Chief Content Editor at Liners and holds final sign-off on every guide, comparison, and explainer published on the platform. She enforces a source-first editorial standard, where product claims, pricing, regulatory positioning, and market data are traced to primary documentation before they go live. Her bylined work applies the same bar she sets across Liners' coverage of African software.
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