What does it actually take to build one of Africa's most ambitious infrastructure companies from scratch and keep building through a regulatory shutdown, a global pandemic, and a currency collapse that wiped out over 70% of your revenue overnight?
Adetayo Bamiduro, co-founder and CEO of Max, the mobility and logistics platform he launched out of MIT in 2015, answers that question with a level of candour that most founders simply do not offer publicly.Tayo grew up in Ibadan in a household shaped by two very different kinds of intensity. His father, a professor who never missed a day of work during a year-long ASUU strike, modelled a dedication to mission that went far beyond personal reward. His mother, known in her media circle as the Iron Lady of Africa work, drove herself from Ibadan to Sokoto State alone for a union meeting in the early 90s. He inherited both of them fully.His path to Max was not a straight line.
He taught himself to code in Visual Basic, built software for vehicle tracking before anyone was calling it a startup, worked at the UAC Group, spent time at Nigeria LNG on Bonny Island where he witnessed for the first time that things in Nigeria could actually work — that order, precision, and organisation were possible within the same country where everything else felt chaotic. That experience changed something in him. He went to MIT to find a bigger platform, and it was there, in an entrepreneurship class taught by Bill Aulet, that Max began as a class project.Seven co-founders started the journey. By the time reality hit and student loan bills came due, only Ty and Chinedu remained. They won a pitch competition they arrived late to. They came second at TechCrunch Battlefield in London and received a crate of beer as their prize — neither of them drinks. They raised a million dollars on the back of $120,000 from Techstars and went back to Nigeria to build.In this conversation, Tayo walks through the hardest chapters without softening them. The three years between seed and Series A surviving on under a million dollars.
The Lagos regulatory ban in 2020 that forced them to shut down 80% of their revenues overnight while he walked into the Lagos State House of Assembly every single day trying to carve out a legal space for the business. COVID hitting two months later. The 2022 currency devaluation that pulled term sheets off the table and turned every investor conversation into a 30-minute defence of Nigeria's macroeconomic outlook — a conversation he had zero control over and found more frustrating than anything else in a decade of building.He also challenges one of the most common founder instincts — the fear of competition. When Gokada and Opay entered the motorcycle ride-hailing space, his first reaction was protective. In hindsight, he says the opposite is true: investors back movements, not companies. If you are the only one in a space, they wonder why. If ten people are in the space, they look for the best one to back. Competition validated Max in the eyes of investors who would never have deployed capital otherwise.And then there is what is coming. Petrol in Nigeria has gone from roughly ₦200 to over ₦1,400 in a decade.
Max is now pairing electric vehicles with solar-powered charging stations — and the goal is to lock in energy prices 20 to 30 years in advance, making the cost of movement predictable for people who have no margin for uncertainty. When Ty talks about this, something shifts in his voice. This is the most excited he gets in the entire conversation. His most important lesson from ten years of building: it is the people.
If you are building anything in Africa, or thinking about it, this one is not optional.