How Y Combinator founder Taiwo Akinropo built a multi-billion-naira delivery business without the hyper-growth playbook

For Taiwo Akinropo, HeyFood wasn't born out of a love for restaurants. It began with a fascination for broken systems. After leaving the University of Ibadan, he built HeyFood into one of Nigeria's leading food delivery platforms, processing more than ₦6.1 billion in transactions. Now, he's betting on autonomous AI, believing Africa should build—not just adopt—the technologies of the future

• Taiwo Akinropo founded HeyFood, a leading Nigerian food delivery platform, driven by his fascination with fixing broken systems rather than a love for restaurants.
• HeyFood addressed inefficiencies in Nigeria’s food delivery industry by prioritizing payments, logistics, and profitable unit economics, rather than just rapid expansion.
• The company's selection by Y Combinator brought credibility and funding, helping it process over ₦6.1 billion in transactions and create income for thousands.

By the time Taiwo Akinropo settled into life as a Computer Science student at the University of Ibadan, he had begun to realise that not all classrooms have walls.

The university had earned its reputation over decades, producing graduates who would go on to shape Nigeria's intellectual and professional life. Akinropo became one more student learning the logic of computers, the discipline of programming, and the craft of building software.

But education has a way of escaping the places designed to contain it. While one education unfolded according to a timetable, another unfolded entirely without one.

Outside campus, people he had never met were already using products he had built. There was HeyPay, a mobile payments solution for merchants. Then there was Mate, a social networking app designed for university students. With every new user came another problem to solve, another lesson to learn. Before long, lectures and entrepreneurship were competing for the same hours.

"I was studying computer science, and I loved it, but I was already building things that people were actually using," Akinropo recalled. "Every hour in a lecture theatre was an hour I wasn't giving to a product that had customers waiting on it."

Eventually, he made a decision that many Nigerians would consider almost unthinkable. After his first year, he left university to focus on building.

Looking back, Akinropo is careful not to romanticise that choice. "I wouldn't hand that decision to everyone as advice. It was right for me because I already had something in motion, and I knew I would keep building whether or not anyone permitted me to," he said.

In many ways, that decision revealed a pattern that would define his career. Akinropo has always been drawn to problems that most people accept as inevitable, asking whether they could be solved differently.

That same instinct would eventually lead him into food delivery. But even then, he wasn't really chasing restaurants. He was chasing a broken system.

The System Behind the Order

By the time Akinropo began thinking seriously about food delivery, several companies had already shown that Nigerians were willing to order meals online. But where others saw an opportunity to move food, he saw a system that still wasn't working the way it should.

Much of Nigeria's food delivery ecosystem still relied on cash, phone calls and manual processes. Orders disappeared. Payments failed. Restaurants struggled to keep track of sales, while riders often worked with little coordination. The inefficiencies were so common that many had simply accepted them as the cost of doing business.

"I came at it from payments first, not from food," he said. "I had already built a merchant payments product, so I looked at food delivery and saw a payments and logistics problem wearing a restaurant menu."

That perspective shaped almost every decision that followed. To Akinropo, food delivery was never the end goal. It was the foundation for something much bigger.

The City Everyone Overlooked

Around the time Akinropo was thinking about his next venture, Nigeria's startup ecosystem had already picked its favourite city. Lagos was where investors were writing cheques, founders were building unicorn dreams, and almost every ambitious startup wanted to be. If you were launching a technology company, conventional wisdom said you started there.

But Akinropo wasn't convinced and stayed in Ibadan. Partly because it was home, but mostly because he believed people were overlooking a much larger opportunity.

"Everyone else was fighting over Lagos," he said. "There was a large, underserved city right where I was, full of restaurants with no real way to sell online."

That decision shaped HeyFood from the start. Food delivery was already a notoriously difficult business, with thin margins, expensive logistics and demanding customers. In Nigeria, unreliable digital payments and weak infrastructure made it even harder. None of that discouraged Akinropo.

If anything, complexity attracted him. "Hard is fine," he said. "Hard, with no serious competition and a clear technical wedge, is a good place to start a company."

Unlike many venture-backed startups chasing rapid expansion, HeyFood took a different path. Growth mattered, but profitability came first.

HeyFood was built with economics at its core. Every order was prepaid through customers' wallets, reducing fraud, simplifying reconciliation and ensuring healthy unit economics from the very first transaction.

The approach meant growing more slowly. But it also meant building a stronger company. Today, HeyFood has processed billions of naira in orders—many times more than it has raised in external funding. "That ratio," Akinropo said, "is the thing I'm actually proud of."

The call from Silicon Valley

By the time HeyFood caught the attention of Y Combinator, Akinropo had already spent years proving that the business could work. Then came the email every startup founder dreams about. HeyFood had been accepted into Y Combinator. For the California-based accelerator, it was another investment. For Akinropo, it was something far more significant.

"The most immediate thing it changed was belief. You are suddenly in rooms with founders operating at a completely different altitude," he recalled. "It resets what you believe is possible," he said.

The accelerator did more than validate the idea. It helped HeyFood raise fund from Y Combinator and gave the company global credibility. Investors paid closer attention, partners became more receptive, and the startup from Ibadan suddenly looked different.

As the first African food delivery startup backed by Y Combinator, HeyFood gained visibility that few African startups in the sector had enjoyed. But Akinropo is quick to separate recognition from execution.

"YC didn't build the product or run the operations," he said. "It opened doors. We still had to walk through them and do the unglamorous work on the other side."

They did. In the years that followed, HeyFood processed more than ₦6.1 billion in transactions, attracted over 260,000 app downloads, and created income opportunities for more than 1,000 riders and merchant partners.

According to Akinropo, the real value of Y Combinator wasn't simply access to capital. It was permission to think bigger.

From Food to Artificial Intelligence

For most founders, building one successful company is enough. For Akinropo, HeyFood became the starting point for a much bigger question. Running the business taught him more than payments or logistics; it showed him how organisations really worked.

The more he watched, the more he realised that modern work was often less about doing the job than coordinating it. Then artificial intelligence arrived. While the world marvelled at AI's ability to write, answer questions and create images, Akinropo saw a different opportunity.

"It came out of the work itself, not out of the hype. I didn't see a better chatbot. I saw something that could finally take that coordination on directly," he said.

That insight became the foundation for Applied General Agents, an AI company building autonomous software that completes tasks rather than simply responding to prompts.

But Akinropo is careful with the word autonomous. In today's AI industry, it has become something of a buzzword, often attached to products that still rely heavily on human direction. His definition is far more demanding.

"An autonomous system is one you give an outcome to, rather than a set of steps," he explained.

Traditional software waits for users to tell it exactly what to do. Autonomous agents, he believes, should be capable of planning, making decisions, using different tools, correcting mistakes and continuing until a task is complete.

"The system is making judgement calls on your behalf, inside boundaries you set."

That philosophy forms the basis of Someone@, one of his latest products. Rather than functioning as another AI assistant, Someone@ is designed to behave more like a personal team. It manages calendars, follows up on emails, coordinates schedules and handles the countless administrative tasks that quietly consume hours each day.

For decades, that kind of support has been reserved for executives with dedicated assistants. Akinropo wants to make it available to everyone. "The real product is giving people their attention back," he said.

Owning the Future

For Akinropo, the most important question about AI isn't how quickly Africa adopts it. It's whether Africa helps build and own it.

"The lazy version of the future is one where this technology is invented somewhere else, and Africa is treated as a market to sell into," he said. "I want the opposite."

He hopes that years from now, future generations will see African engineers creating technology shaped by the continent's own realities, not merely adapting products designed elsewhere.

It is an ambition that feels consistent with the path Akinropo has taken, always looking past the obvious opportunity to the system beneath it.