Day 1–1000: How Tunde Akin-Moses built Sycamore from his living room

May 10, 2025 - By 4idiotz

Table of Contents

Article Summary

Day 1-1000 follows the journey of Tunde Akin-Moses, co-founder of Sycamore, as he builds a fintech startup in Nigeria. Frustrated with the disparity in lending opportunities for employees vs. small business owners, Akin-Moses and his co-founders launched Sycamore, a peer-to-peer lending platform, from Akin-Moses’ living room in 2019. Utilizing their combined savings, they raised around $50,000 from friends, family, and LBS classmates to start issuing microloans to SMEs. Despite challenges, such as managing operations from a living room and hiring difficulties, Sycamore has become a successful and profitable fintech company with over 60 employees.

What This Means for You

Identify problems in your community and consider innovative solutions – Akin-Moses noticed a gap in Nigeria’s lending system and took action.
Start small and don’t be afraid to pivot – Sycamore initially explored three ideas before discovering a more promising and capital-efficient peer-to-peer lending model.
Embrace resilience – Despite facing numerous challenges, Akin-Moses and his co-founders persevered and established a successful fintech business.
Future opportunities for African fintech – As Sycamore grows and transitions to new offerings, such as asset management, it paves the way for further developments in Africa’s fintech landscape.

Original Post

What does it really take to build a startup in Africa—from the first idea to the thousandth day? In Day 1–1000, we follow founders through the raw, unfiltered journey of company-building: the early scrambles, the quiet breakthroughs, the painful pivots, and the milestones that shape what a business becomes. In this inaugural edition, we sit with Tunde Akin-Moses, co-founder of Sycamore, to unpack how a simple lending idea grew into one of Nigeria’s quietly resilient fintech stories.

Day 1: A loan, a list and a leap

Tunde Akin-Moses didn’t set out to become a fintech founder. But ever since his days working in credit at a consulting firm, he had noticed a persistent gap in Nigeria’s lending system—one that seemed to punish the people who needed credit most.

Before Sycamore, he was comfortably employed at a major consulting firm and moonlighting as a small laundry business owner. But the Nigerian credit system treated those two roles very differently.

“As a nine-to-five employee, banks lined up to give me loans. But when I needed a loan for my side hustle, even with similar revenue, it was impossible,” he recalled. The disparity nagged at him, but it was not enough to quit his job. That push came later, at Lagos Business School, where he was enrolled in an MBA program that would alter the trajectory of his life.

During a case study on African fintechs serving SMEs, Akin-Moses discovered a stat that stunned him: SMEs accounted for just 1% of all bank credit in Nigeria.

Along with his classmates—Mayowa Adeosun and Onyinye Okonji—who would later become his co-founders, Akin-Moses began testing ideas for a solution.

Akin-Moses and his cofounders first explored about three ideas. First, they thought to give out educational loans to MBA students, but the capital required for such large ticket sizes was prohibitive. “It didn’t make sense to fund two students when we could help twenty small businesses instead,” he said.

The team pivoted early.

Inspired by Lending Club and Prosper in the U.S., they stumbled upon peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and realized its promise: a tech-enabled platform where individuals could pool their money to lend directly to others—typically small businesses or consumers—without relying on banks or traditional financial institutions. The model was radical but lean. It sidestepped the need for a banking license, required minimal capital, and thrived on the power of distributed trust and digital efficiency.

So they launched Sycamore from Akin-Moses’ living room.