| Name | Edward Popoola |
| Known for | Co-founder and CTO of Cowrywise |
| Alma mater | Obafemi Awolowo University, located in Ile Ife, Osun State, NigeriaStanford University, Stanford, California, United States |
| Ethnicity | Yoruba |
| Occupation | Computer Engineer, Technical Consultant, IT Infrastructure Designer, and Entrepreneur |
Who is Edward Popoola?
Edward Popoola is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at CowryWise. CowryWise helps people to save and invest their money with ease.
CowryWise is licensed by the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a portfolio management company, and it is based in Lagos State, Nigeria.
Edward Popoola has also worked with a lot of individuals and companies. Some of them include Qrios Networks, Nixarus, Interswitch Group, African Advantage Telecoms West Africa Limited and CowryWise.
Early life and education
Not much is known about Edward’s early life, but he is an indigene of a Yoruba town. In 2002, he enrolled at the Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU. He studied Computer Engineering and graduated in 2008.
Eight (8) years later in 2016, Edward Popoola attended Stanford University, located at 450, Serra Mall, Stanford, California 94305, USA. Here, he obtained his Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate.
Career and employment history
Qrios Networks
After Edward Popoola graduated from Obafemi Awolowo University in 2008, he started working with Qrios Networks. He was a Technical Consultant between September 2008 to February 2009.
Edward provided technical consultancy configuration, maintenance, and performance tuning for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Servers. He also handled a large-scale Operating System platform deployment for Keystone Bank (T24 deployment).
Nixarus
Between February 2009 to August 2010, Edward Popoola was a Technical Consultant for Nixarus. He helped customers with design deployment, management, guidance, and support on Enterprise Linux.
While at Nixarus, he also served as a Senior Instructor for Enterprise customers.
Interswitch Group
From August 2010 to February 2011, Edward Popoola was an Infrastructure Analyst for the Interswitch Group. Here, he did a lot of things.
- He did the network configuration and monitoring of Interswitch ATM network links to the 24 banks in Nigeria. He also configured the network routes for customers on Cisco Routers.
- Edward handled Interswitch’s virtual Infrastructure which includes virtual servers on VMWare ESX. Migrating physical servers to virtual servers.
- He automated Backups for data centre servers with Bash scripts.
- Edward Popoola was also in charge of monitoring the Enterprise servers, Network devices, and storage systems, including resource management and resource allocation.
- Edward was responsible for physical and virtual server installation and provisioning
African Advantage Telecoms West Africa Limited
From May 2011 to May 2017, Edward Popoola worked at African Advantage Telecoms, also known as AAT.
For the first 2 years, he served as the Integration Specialist and Support Engineer. He provided support for third-party vendors and application integrators. Edward Popoola helped them to connect to AAT’s Init8r platform, a USSD Gateway on the MTN network.
Edward also handled infrastructure documentation and technical support reports. He was also in charge of performance statistics.
In February 2013, he was promoted to the post of the Team Leader of Infrastructure Support and Integration. Here, he solved issues with customers across third-party vendors’ application stacks.
He also successfully handled the installation and deployment of the MTN Outbound voice campaign. It was through this process that they were able to make 2.3 million customer calls each day.
In December 2015, Edward Popoola was promoted to the post of Technical Director. He led the local and remote development, integration and technical infrastructure support teams to support the company’s customers all over Africa.
He also helped the sales management and marketing teams with training and revenue modeling. He boosted the AAT support process for efficiency, cost-saving, and performance.
CowryWise
In July 2017, Edward Popoola co-founded CowryWise with Razaq Ahmed, another graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University.
Cowrywise is a personal finance platform that allows users to automatically save and invest. That way, you won’t have to do it yourself every time.
Saving money is one of the best financial decisions that you can make. However, saving money is not easy. You still know the money belongs to you, and you can withdraw at any time if you don’t have enough self-control.
But that’s where Cowrywise comes into play. With Cowrywise, you can save for the future also earning a very high interest of 15% per annum.
Edward Popoola is the Chief Technology Officer and a co-founder at CowryWise.
Suggested For You – How to save or invest money with Cowrywise
How CowryWise was funded
According to Crunchbase data, Cowrywise has raised a capital of USD 3.3 million in more than 6 rounds. The last funding was gathered on Jan 28, 2021.
Cowrywise has been funded by 7 investors. The most recent ones include Sahil Lavingia and Tsadik Foundation.
In June 2018, Cowrywise received seed funding from Microtraction and was accepted into the Y Combinator Summer 2018 Batch July 2018.
In December 2018, Cowrywise was mentioned among the 50 World-Changing Startups to Watch in 2019. This was done by Kairos, an early-stage investment company in the United States.
Cowrywise joined Catalyst Fund’s portfolio in January 2020, a JP Morgan and UK Aid backed fintech accelerator.
In January 2021, Cowrywise raised $3 million in pre-series A funding. A round that was led by Washington DC-based Quona Capital.
In June 2021, CowryWise became licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This makes it able to operate as a Fund Manager in the Nigerian capital market.
Edward Popoola is available on social media. He is also on LinkedIn and Crunchbase.
Twitter: @edwardpopoola
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