My name is Seye Bandele. I’m cofounder at PaidHR, a fast growing HRTech platform in Africa. I’m passionate about the future of work in Africa and I support entrepreneurs in building and scaling their businesses
I’m currently helping smart founders fine-tune their pitch and get funding for their businesses. Get in touch
I’m based in Lagos, Nigeria. I live with my beautiful wife and two lovely daughters. An avid lover of books and constantly curious, I’m looking to use my experience and network to help build human capacity on the continent so that we can fulfill our potential in all our various fields of interest.
After graduating with a degree in Agricultural Sciences, I’ve spent the last 14 years working in technology and helping to build Nigeria and Africa’s fledgling tech industry. My career spans GIS, E-commerce, Retail, Fintech and now HRTech. Specifically my skillsets include strategy & planning, GTM, sales, marketing and people management. I am also passionate about film, music and photography and find myself dabbling in those as a hobby.
Altogether, I’ve been fortunate to raise (and help raise) over $3m for various startups in the past 3 years. I understand that there are tons of brilliant founders building great companies who can’t access the funding they need, I want to use my experience to help make that easier for as many African founders as possible.
You can read about some of my work below.
PaidHR
PaidHR is an audacious attempt to simplify people operations for African businesses. The company’s vision is to simplify the world of work while also improving the lives of African workers. While we provide software for HR automation, we are also connecting employees to quick access financial solutions that help them live better.
Konga
I served as Head of Marketing for Konga for 2 years. During the time, I led a team of 19 people across digital, brand, content, design and social media marketing. We helped grow the business 207% year on year.
Showlove
I was on the founding team of Showlove with two of my close friends. A company attempting to revolutionize gifting on the continent. A lot of money goes to waste due to mismatched gifting and we were building a platform that helped people get the gifts they really wanted. We struggled to create a behaviour out of it and ultimately pivoted it into a B2B gifting service, however, the business failed and we shut it down in ‘21.
Better Group
Better Group houses my attempts to help African creators in film and music access the visibility and support required to elevate their craft and by extension, improve the quality of output in film and music on the continent.
Our first attempt is BetterSound Studios, a content production studio in Lagos, providing a stage for Africa’s new age artists
And a whole bunch of other stuff. See my LinkedIn here.
Starting this year, I am using my combined experience to help the best founders fine-tune their pitches, get their businesses off the ground and possibly help them access startup capital. Now, I’m a founder myself and time is very limited, I possibly can’t respond to everyone but I will identify the best businesses using criteria I’ve collected from pitching to more than 30 investors and raising over $3m.
“Amat Victoria Curam”
Victory loves careful preparation.
— Latin Proverb
Other Stuff
I’ll share other interesting updates and things I do here.
I recently sat with Peace Itimi on her show, Founders Connect and discussed the story of building PaidHR and a few other insights in my entrepreneurship journey.
Sat with Joseph Don and told the story of our growth at PaidHR and some of the challenges we’ve faced building a startup in Africa.
I had a chat with the guys at the Growing Africa Podcast, I’ve included the episode here, if you’d like to check that out.