Nobody has published a full count of Nigerian startup founders by the kind of university they attended, so the honest answer to “how many from private, how many from public” starts with a warning: any single number you see online is built on a small sample. This piece pulls together every public dataset we could find, then adds its own tally of 28 of Nigeria’s best-funded startups, checking each founder’s first degree against published sources. The short version is that public universities produced more founders in absolute numbers, roughly 10 to 7 on the strictest count, but private universities supplied far more than their share of students would predict. Both camps in the old online argument can find support in the figures, and neither can claim a win.
Start with the datasets that already exist. Techpoint Africa’s West African Startup Decade Report, which tracked startups that raised at least $1 million cumulatively between 2010 and 2019, found 51 such companies and reported that Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) had produced 12 founders by first degree, ahead of Covenant University with six. Nairametrics, in an August 2021 article that cites the same report for its wider national figures, added the University of Lagos (UNILAG) at five and said Nigerian universities supplied 43.6% of founders at the bachelor’s level, though it did not make clear whether the university counts came from the report or from its own analysis. Neither piece says whether the counts are founders or startups, and the full ranking sits in a 164-page report this newsroom could not open. Taken at face value, the three named schools account for 23 founders, six of them from one private university, so Covenant holds about a quarter of that group. In July 2026, Nairametrics listed the universities behind Africa’s unicorn founders. Its three Nigerian entries were all public: OAU (Flutterwave’s Olugbenga Agboola and Moniepoint’s Tosin Eniolorunda), the University of Benin (Interswitch’s Mitchell Elegbe) and UNILAG (Moniepoint’s Felix Ike). No private Nigerian university appears on it, though that list covers only a handful of companies.
For the tally, we took 28 Nigerian-founded startups drawn from the best-funded lists, researched every co-founder we could identify, and counted only founders whose first degree came from a Nigerian university and was confirmed by a news report, Wikipedia or an official profile. Where only a business directory or a user-edited profile supported the claim, we left the founder out of the main count. On that strict basis, 17 founders qualify: 10 from public universities and 7 from private ones. OAU leads with five (Flutterwave’s Agboola, Moniepoint’s Eniolorunda, Cowrywise’s Razaq Ahmed, Chowdeck’s Femi Aluko and Koolboks’ Ayoola Dominic). Covenant also has five (PiggyVest’s Odunayo Eweniyi, Somto Ifezue and Joshua Chibueze, and ThriveAgric’s Uka Eje and Ayo Arikawe). Babcock has two, both Paystack founders, Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi. The rest are single names: UNILAG (Felix Ike), Benin (Mitchell Elegbe), the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (Arnergy’s Femi Adeyemo), the University of Calabar (54gene’s Abasi Ene-Obong) and the Federal University of Technology, Minna (Raenest’s Victor Alade). If we add nine more founders whose degrees appear only on directory or Crunchbase-style pages, all of them at public universities, the count becomes 19 public to 7 private. Counting by company rather than by person, which avoids letting one friend group inflate a school’s score, 9 of the companies have a confirmed public-university founder and 3 (Paystack, PiggyVest and ThriveAgric) have a private one. For 16 of the 28 companies, we could not confirm any founder’s Nigerian first degree, because the founders trained abroad or the degree is not published.
| University | Type | Founders in strict count |
|---|---|---|
| Obafemi Awolowo University | Public | 5 |
| Covenant University | Private | 5 |
| Babcock University | Private | 2 |
| University of Lagos | Public | 1 |
| University of Benin | Public | 1 |
| Ladoke Akintola University of Technology | Public | 1 |
| University of Calabar | Public | 1 |
| Federal University of Technology, Minna | Public | 1 |
| Total | 10 public, 7 private | 17 |
The count means little without a denominator, and the denominator is lopsided. According to the National Universities Commission’s 2020 report on 2019 enrolment, as summarised by ThisDay, about 2.1 million students were enrolled, with federal universities holding 68%, state universities 26% and private universities 5%. In March 2024, the NUC’s acting executive secretary said private universities hold less than 10% of the more than two million students, roughly 200,000 people. The gap between those two figures is a reminder that estimates vary, and we found no official breakdown by graduating year. The timing matters most. Private universities only began to be licensed in 1999, with Babcock among the first three, and a 2003 US diplomatic cable put their combined share of Nigeria’s university students at under 1%. Most of the founders in our tally entered university between the early 2000s and the late 2000s, when the private share was between that under-1% and the later 5%. If private universities supplied 5% of graduates in the relevant years, you would expect fewer than one private-educated founder among 17. We counted seven. Even at a generous 10%, you would expect fewer than two. At the founder level, that gap is very unlikely to be chance. At the company level, with 3 of 12, it is more ambiguous: at a 10% baseline, a result like that would turn up about one time in nine by luck alone.
Several things stop that from being a clean verdict. The sample is small and was built from well-funded, mostly Lagos-based fintech and consumer companies, which means it reflects who gets venture money, not who starts businesses. PiggyVest’s three Covenant founders are classmates in the same cohort, so they move the founder count more than three independent stories would. Selection works on both sides: families that can pay private fees often also have stronger school backgrounds and networks, so some of the effect may come from who enrolls, not what the campus teaches, and public universities also hold many talented students who never get the introductions or capital a Lagos network provides. Survivorship matters too, since we only see founders whose companies raised money. Then there is the large group this framing leaves out. At least 13 of the founders we researched took their first degree abroad, at schools such as the University of Waterloo, Brunel University London, the University of Southern California and Imperial College London, and several others, including Kuda’s Musty Mustapha and most of the Risevest and TradeDepot teams, have no published first degree. LemFi’s Ridwan Olalere is a case in point: Nairametrics lists physics and electronics at Bells University of Technology, a private Nigerian school, before aeronautical engineering in China, and sources disagree on which counts as his first degree, so we left him out of the tally.
So who is right? The people who say private universities produce founders have real evidence: Covenant ties OAU in our strict count despite being far newer and much smaller, and Paystack, PiggyVest and ThriveAgric all trace back to private campuses. The people who say public universities remain the backbone also have evidence: they hold the larger share of founders in every dataset above, they supplied every Nigerian-educated founder in the 2026 unicorn list, and many of the country’s most valuable companies began in their lecture halls. What the numbers cannot show is whether a private campus causes success, since the strongest candidates for the cause, family resources, early exposure and an uninterrupted calendar, are tangled together. The calendar point is concrete: the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has struck at least 16 times since 1999, including a roughly nine-month stoppage in 2020 and an eight-month one in 2022, according to a BusinessDay timeline. Costs matter as well. Nairametrics puts Covenant’s 2025/2026 tuition at about ₦1.71 million to ₦2.01 million a session and Babcock’s at about ₦813,000 to ₦2.0 million, against the near-free fees at most federal institutions.
The practical lesson for students and parents is to treat ownership as one factor among several, and to ask better questions of any campus: does the course finish on time, can you build things with other builders, and are there alumni who hire or invest. A student at OAU, Benin or UNILAG with a developer community and a mentor has the same road open as one at Covenant or Babcock. What would settle the debate is data nobody has published: founder counts divided by graduates per university across the same years, for all startups and not only the funded ones. Until a researcher or an ecosystem body like Techpoint or Briter releases that, treat any claim that one type of school “produces more founders” as an opinion with a few good examples attached.
Sources: Techpoint Africa, “OAU, CU produced the highest number of millionaire West African startup founders”; Techpoint, West African Startup Decade Report introduction; Nairametrics, “These Nigerian universities produced the most startup founders” (2021); Nairametrics, “OAU, UNILAG: see the 10 universities that produced Africa’s unicorn founders” (2026); ThisDay, “The State of University Education” (2024); Ripples Nigeria on the NUC’s under-10% private enrolment remark (2024); Babcock University, Our History; US diplomatic cable on private universities in Nigeria, 2003; Nairametrics, Nigeria’s top startup founders by funding raised in 2025; founder profiles on Wikipedia (Shola Akinlade, Ezra Olubi, Odunayo Eweniyi, Ayoola Dominic, Abasi Ene-Obong), BusinessDay and ThisDay (Moniepoint and Interswitch founders, Uka Eje).
