Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner

Wale Ayeni leads the IFC’s Venture Capital practice focused on Africa, South of the Sahara – the International Finance Organization is part of the World Bank Group. The IFC’s Venture capital team invests in technology companies in frontier markets, and has deployed over ~$800MM in early/growth stage tech investments over the past decade.

IFC’s early/growth stage tech portfolio in Africa includes Andela(Edtech); Africa’s talking(APIs), Fawry (Fintech), Interswitch(Fintech), Mobisol(Cleantech), TwigaFoods(mCommerce), Zoona(Fintech), etc.

Wale has a global technology experience spanning several roles including Venture Capital, Investment Banking, Corporate Development, and Microprocessor & ASIC chip design. Prior to the IFC, Wale led venture capital early-stage investments in disruptive start-ups across various technology sectors for Orange in Silicon Valley with representative investments in the US including PayJoy(FinTech), Veniam(Mesh Networks), Chain (Blockchain, acquired), WEVR (Virtual Reality).

Wale started his finance career with J.P. Morgan’s Technology Investment Banking group in San Francisco where he successfully executed over $12 Billion worth of closed transactions spanning mergers & acquisitions to IPOs for large-cap technology clients including Facebook, Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Intel Corp., AMD, Shutterfly, etc.

Wale started his career as an Engineer, and in his previous technology career Wale was a microprocessor design Engineer with Intel Corp. where he led critical aspects of Intel’s “CSI” chip architecture – the biggest micro-architecture change in Intel’s history. He also led aspects of the very first “Snapdragon” chipsets working at Qualcomm Inc.’s chip design center enabling the initial smartphone designs.

Wale has an MBA from Tuck, Dartmouth College, and his Bachelor’s degree with distinguished “Red diploma” from Moscow University. He is a Kauffman Venture Capital Fellow and a recipient of the top global 100 Rising Stars award in Corporate Venture.