A product is only as good as the team behind it, so we want to take a moment to introduce you to the talented and motivated team behind Wicrypt. The team has a diverse and international background.
Ugochukwu Aronu — CEO and Co-Founder
A serial entrepreneur, Ugochukwu (or Ugo for short) has founded several companies that helped African businesses and banks scale and monetize online. Previously, Ugo worked for KPMG Nigeria performing vulnerability assessment and penetration tests on systems of financial institutions.
In 2017, Ugo built a Crypto wallet from scratch that supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Derivatives, Ethereum, and other ERC20 tokens. The wallet is still currently being used in the backend of numerous exchanges. The next year he developed a peer-to-peer internet sharing platform for the purpose of decentralizing control of internet access. That company, of course, is called Wicrypt. This system was developed to run on mobile, as well as the firmware for routers on the Linux embedded development environment. Ugo also founded Xend Finance, a platform which allows Credit Unions, Cooperatives, and Individuals to access DeFi and stable currency saving opportunities.
Ugo graduated from The University of Nigeria, where he built a home automation system. The design has the highest reads in the history of research papers from the University.
Toni Dada — COO
Toni is an experienced commercial leader and data enthusiast with over 14 years of international experience in strategy development, digital transformation, customer value management and business intelligence. She has worked across retail, TMT, and financial services for employers (or clients) such as MTN, Migo (formerly kwikmoney), 9mobile (formerly Etisalat), Accenture, Nielsen, AIICO Insurance, Chapel Hill Denham, and Kuda MFB.
Toni is also the founder of Enterscale Services, a growth bureau that helps start-ups, scale-ups and corporates prepare for and achieve scale or transformation in today’s digital world.
Toni has a Master’s in Marketing and Strategy from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.
Ogbo Chidozie — Software Engineer and Co-Founder
Ogbo is a software engineer with experience in leading technical teams, building usable products, analyzing and solving hard technological problems.
He has played an instrumental role in developing companies and products such as Paylot, Obiex Finance, and Dispacha. His development background includes developing products using web, mobile, and blockchain technologies in the financial and logistics space.
Ogbo graduated from Nnamdi Azikiwe University with a degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering.
Nweke Chukwuemeka — Software Engineer and Co-Founder
Nweke has worked in developing projects in diverse industries, including healthcare, supply chains, blockchain, and more recently in the payment space. He specializes in designing distributed systems, blockchain projects, and in writing solidity smart contracts. He has also worked as an advisor to several projects, including Xend Finance, Binary Hills, and Ugarsoft, providing technical advice on how best to scale their blockchain solutions.
Nweke has a Computer Science degree from Nnamdi Azikiwe University.
Ayodele Olabiyi — Head of Innovation and Data Science
Ayodele is an award-winning data scientist, mathematician, and certified Mixpanel Implementation partner. He honed his skills in the Innovation and Transformation Group at MTN in Nigeria where he worked on data models to increase customer profitability on the network. Ayodele is an expert at applying data findings into relevant information about the effectiveness of business strategy or product optimization.
Ayodele is also an active volunteer at Data Science Nigeria, where he develops AI/ML solutions in the areas of Natural Language Processing and Computer vision.
Ayodele is currently a research intern at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania .
Opata Chibueze — Senior Technical Consultant
Opata Chibueze is a software veteran with over 10 years of professional software development experience in development, product, as well as in leadership capacities. Having tinkered with low level code and system binaries in Microsoft Windows since the time of Windows 2000, coupled with wide exposure to compiled/scripting environments, he is an excellent asset to the Wicrypt team.
As a Senior Engineer and Head of Security, he brings his vast experience/exposure to fine polishing our product quality and performance, as well as ensure the best practices in our server, code security, integration pipelines, and maintenance processes.
Some achievements:
1. Built an antivirus software that made use of advanced heuristics and knowledge of Windows internals to beat contemporary antivirus software in local threat detection in 2008
2. Won fastest programmer award at national association of CS students in 2011
3. Shortened a 9-weeks international contract project to 6 weeks in 2013
4. Built and won USPF National Hackathon in 2015 with a data portal capable of dynamic analysis and charting of data in 24 hours.
Thank you for taking the time to get to know our team! 🙏🏾
