As a hard-working software engineer in Nigeria, before he started Wicrypt, Ugochukwu Aronu was working with his colleagues at the office when his Internet Service Provider lost signal. For a programmer, not being able to connect to the internet for one minute felt like being blocked from the universe. Ugochukwu reached out to his colleagues to ask to share their hotspot with him, but they refused, responding that he would consume a large amount of their internet data, which was quite expensive in Africa. They said they could not quantify the amount of data he would use, and so they wouldn’t know how to bill him, because no technology supported it at that time.
That was the eureka moment for Ugochukwu — in 2018 — when he conceived the idea to create a system that would enable people to share their WiFi and get paid in real-time.
He shared the idea with his colleague, Emeka Nweke, who was sitting next to him. Emeka thought it was great and would be interested in working on the company with him.
Ugo started looking out for people to work on Wicrypt, targeting first someone with android mobile development skills. Ogbo Chidozie was that person and he agreed to work with the two because he felt it was something no one had done and he wanted to build something new.
Without seeking any funding, the team was not sure it would work out. So, they dedicated their free time to work on Wicrypt, which mostly came during the evenings and on weekends. They bootstrapped throughout the development stage and launch phase.
To everyone’s surprise, Wicrypt started making returns early and became profitable without any investments! Unfortunately, they realized that even though they seemed to be doing it right, a lot was wrong and it was because they did not have a well set up structure to enable them to scale up.
They were just three engineers who built something people wanted and paid for without knowing how to scale their operations, market the product, and or create more business development opportunities. They started reaching out to people who could help them fix their internal operations and structure and that was when they met Toni Dada, the CEO of Enterscale. She was the only one who understood what they had built in less than five minutes of explaining, and they knew she was the right person for the COO job. After over 14 years in the Telecommunications industry, and experience working for the two biggest Telecommunications companies in Nigeria, she was a perfect fit.
As the product started scaling, the need for more engineering manpower became evident, so Ugo reached out to Chibueze Opata, one of the best engineers he had ever met. They attended the same University but Chibueze was 3 years ahead of Ugo in school. He had built an antivirus software as a teenager and had won global code-hackathons. In Ugo’s early days as a coder, Chibueze was one of the judges of the Android Student’s Club where Ugo was a hackathon winner. Ugo never thought that Chibueze would agree to work with him on Wicrypt, but after they spoke, Chibueze was super excited about the idea. He was impressed by the traction they had without any investment and decided to be a part of the project in 2021.
Since the inception in 2018, Wicrypt has been on a very fast trajectory, securing a government grant and partnership in Enugu state to provide WiFi to over 3 million residents of the state.
Other achievements include:
1. Only African blockchain company selected by Kin Foundation in the world for $15,000 grant — https://www.ccn.com/social-cryptocurrency-kin-selects-40-apps-for-3-million-developer-incubator/
2. Wicrypt emerged as one of the winners of the Emerging Technology competition organized by Nigeria Communication Commission and received a grant of $5,500 — https://nipc.gov.ng/2019/12/28/nigeria-blockchain-startup-wicrypt-gets-funding-from-nigeria-communication-commission-ncc-%EF%BB%BF/
3. Wicrypt Emerged as one of thetop 30 companies our of 673 companies in the Africa50 global challenge — https://twitter.com/ICAfrica50/status/1288485602414010369?s=09
If you’d like to work with Wicrypt in your local communities, email at hello@wicrypt.com and follow Wicrypt on Twitter and Telegram for more updates.
