You don’t hear much about African tech startups entering the European market. But a few fintech companies like Lidya and Korapay have expanded into Eastern Europe and the U.K., respectively. The most recent development is the announcement of Bluechip Technologies’ launch in Europe.
Bluechip Technologies is an African enterprise company that collaborates with global OEMs like Microsoft and Oracle to offer data warehousing solutions and enterprise applications to banks, telcos, and insurance companies.
The Nigeria-based systems integrator believes the expansion will better position it as a “new competitive entrant in the EU market offering data warehousing and analytics products as well as highly experienced senior data engineers from its Nigeria team as consultants for European firms”.
Olumide Soyombo, a prominent angel investor in Nigeria who established the Voltron Capital fund in 2021, co-founded Bluechip Technologies with Kazeem Tewogbade. The business focuses on enterprise systems, analytics, and data warehousing for banks and telcos. Bluechip Technologies was founded with a ₦5 million (about $30,000 at the time) seed investment from Soyombo’s father.
Since then, it has grown to employ up to 200 consultants and has entered new African markets like Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, and Ghana. The company now boasts of pan-African and international clients, including FirstBank, MTN, 9mobile, Lafarge, GTBank, and Access Bank.
The data warehouse service offered by Bluechip gathers data from various sources and transforms it into knowledge that helps businesses identify trends like customer lifetime value, churn, and business analytics. Telcos also create airtime vouchers using the company’s simplex voucher management system.
Bluechip Technologies is of the few African tech firms focusing on training and placing data professionals. It recently launched Primo Academy, a pipeline six-month curriculum of data professionals (kind of like an Andela-esque model) for itself, local and international partners.
Soyombo claims that his company has a great opportunity to provide specialized services in Europe due to the post-pandemic trend in remote working, the critical shortage of tech talent, and the rise in demand for more effective data management. (Recent research projects the big data and business analytics market size in the region to hit $105 billion+ by 2027.)
The company believes it can do the same in Europe and wants to target the telco and banking sectors from its headquarters in Ireland after delivering a variety of corporate IT infrastructure solutions in the African market in collaboration with multinational OEMs.
“We built this core enterprise business application for banks and telcos and the talent pool to address these needs. The whole play here is to be that systems integrator provider to the EU market. The pandemic has accelerated the need for that global flat workspace, and how to place those engineers while working with our partners like Oracle and Microsoft, and to do this cheaper than India or Eastern Europe,” Soyombo said.
Richard Lewis, the CEO of Bluechip EU Subsidiary, will oversee the European expansion. He was the CEO of the UK-based Bluechip partner, Business Logic Systems. Lewis served as the company’s senior vice president of worldwide sales up until this year when it was acquired by Ireland-based Evolving Systems, a supplier of software for linked mobile devices to over 100 network operators across 60+ countries. His background will be crucial in connecting Bluechip’s data engineers and IP-packaged goods with European partners, particularly the company’s recently released customer data management and cash management solutions.
“Richard has a good feel of the market. He has seen some of the initial requirements from customers that can make him say, “hey, if this is how what you’re paying for a developer in India, we can give you an equally quality developer for 20-30% less this price. And that’s the target that we’re pursuing,” Soyombo explained.
Despite the company not having venture capital backing (its business is such that VC money isn’t always required to scale), Bluechip’s growth over the past decade has practically mirrored the development of the African tech ecosystem and similar enterprises in the same period. For instance, when Andela first began in 2014, its physical centers for recruiting, vetting, and training engineers to work remotely for multinational corporations were only located in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. The unicorn, however, experienced a 750 percent rise in applications from outside of Africa as it expanded to over 80 nations after turning remote.
Bluechip, which provides one of its services using an Andela-like model, eventually hopes to join the ranks of Tech Mahindra and Tata Consulting of India as a venerable global provider of information technology services and consulting. The business earned roughly $5 million in revenue in 2014 and about $50 million in 2021.
Soyombo believes that with its intentions for pan-African and international expansion, the business’s revenues might reach $250 million in five years. “We want to test it out and see how it performs on the EU market. The co-founder and investor stated that there are also plans to grow internationally, potentially in Francophone Africa and North America.
Join our mailing list to get the latest tech news and stay up-to-date on African Tech Startups.
