Founders Of The Week: Kayode Faturoti And Usman Balogun

• Kayode Faturoti and Usman Balogun co-founded Cardtonic after recognising the challenges Nigerians faced when making international payments and saw an opportunity to use gift cards as an alternative payment solution.
• The pair launched Cardtonic as a bootstrapped startup, funding the business themselves and growing it without relying on venture capital in its early years.
• Kayode brought the original idea and initial capital, while Balogun took charge of day-to-day operations, helping transform a manual service into a scalable fintech platform.
• Under their leadership, Cardtonic expanded from gift card trading into a broader financial services platform offering virtual dollar cards, bill payments and other digital payment solutions.
• Kayode and Usman have built Cardtonic into one of Nigeria’s notable fintech success stories, growing the company across Nigeria and Ghana while maintaining a focus on solving real-world payment challenges.

Website: https://cardtonic.com/

Tell Me About Yourselves and Cardtonic

We’re Kayode Faturoti and Usman Balogun, co-founders of Cardtonic. We’ve been building together since 2018, Kayode leads product and engineering, Usman leads finance and operations, and that split has basically defined how the company runs. Cardtonic is one of Africa’s leading platforms for virtual dollar cards, gift cards, bill payments, eSIMs, and gadgets. Now serves 2M+ users across Africa – fully bootstrapped, no external funding.

What Inspired You To Start Cardtonic, and What Problem Were You Trying To Solve?

Millions of Africans are underserved by the global digital economy, access to dollars, cross-border payments, and everyday financial tools is harder here than it should be. Gift cards were our entry point, but the mission has always been to give people a simple, trustworthy way to participate in that wider economy. That’s what shaped everything we built afterward.

What Has Been Your Biggest Challenge So Far, and How Did You Overcome It?

We started with about ₦5 million and no investors. That was the challenge and, weirdly, the gift. When there’s no VC money cushioning you, every spend has to make sense, and you have to be profitable early, or you die. So we became obsessive about the boring things, margins, retention, reinvesting revenue instead of burning it, hiring slowly and only when it hurt not to. We chose revenue over vanity metrics before that was a fashionable thing to say. That discipline is the only reason a bootstrapped company now serve 2M+ users and reached the scale it has.

Can You Describe a Pivotal Moment That Significantly Shaped the Direction of Cardtonic?

The defining shift came when the Central Bank of Nigeria clamped down on international spending, cutting the limits on naira debit cards to almost nothing during the FX squeeze.

Overnight, millions of people lost an easy way to pay for anything priced in dollars, subscriptions, online purchases, software, services abroad. Gift cards quietly became the workaround. People started using them as a de facto dollar instrument: a way to store value and pay for international services when the banks couldn’t help them. This was well before virtual dollar cards existed, so gift cards were filling a gap the formal system had left wide open.

Recognizing that was the turning point for us. We stopped thinking of Cardtonic as a place to simply trade gift cards and started building it as a reliable infrastructure around a real, structural need, dollar access for everyday Africans. That insight is what set our direction, and it’s why the natural next step years later was to launch our own virtual dollar cards. We followed the same problem as it evolved.

How Do You Define Success?

For the business: Being the platform Africans trust by default for moving and spending value, profitable, durable, and still standing long after the hype cycles. We’ve always measured success in retention and trust, not headlines.

For ourselves as founders: The freedom to keep building. Success is being able to solve the next problem we find interesting, with a team that grows into better operators than we are, without needing anyone’s permission to do it.

What Advice Would You Give To Someone Thinking About Launching Their Own Startup?

Fall in love with customers and revenue, not funding. A raise is not a milestone; it’s a loan against a promise you now have to keep. Solve a real problem for real people, charge for it early, and let the market tell you the truth. And get comfortable being bored, because most of the work that builds a durable company is unglamorous and repetitive. If you need applause to keep going, you’ll quit before it pays off.

What’s Next for Cardtonic? Any Exciting Developments We Should Watch Out For?

Three things. First, Pil a B2B spend-management platform that lets African businesses fund and track corporate cards, advertising spend, and SaaS in one place. Second, we’re deepening the consumer platform, adding more of what our users already ask us for and pushing further in the super-app direction. And third, new markets, we’ve proven the model in Nigeria and Ghana, and we’re building toward more of the continent.

Want to be featured as TechRound’s Founder of the Week? Find out more about this weekly feature and how to get involved here.

Founder’s 5 with Kayode Faturoti and Usman Balogun

We wanted to know more about the men behind Cardtonic, so we’ve put together the exclusive Founders’ 5 with Kayode Faturoti and Usman Balogun.

Favourite business tool

Usman: Our internal treasury dashboard – the one that keep the money legible.

Kayode: Notion – it’s where thinking, documentation, and decisions live for me.

One lesson you learned the hard way?

Usman: Never build a critical service on a single provider. We now run up to five partners for one service, so if one fails, users never feel it. Redundancy is what keeps the platform reliable.

Kayode: The team is the most important thing in any company. Product, strategy, and capital all matter, but the people you build with are what determine whether any of it lasts.

One future trend you’re watching?

Usman: Stablecoins are becoming the default rails for cross-border payments in Africa.

Kayode: AI agents running real operational work, not just answering questions.

One quote you live by

Usman: “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is king.”

Kayode: “Companies should be run by good ideas, not hierarchy.”

One book/podcast you recommend

Usman: “The Diary of a CEO” by Steven Bartlett.

Kayode: “Same as Ever” by Morgan Housel.

Want to be featured as TechRound’s Founder of the Week? Know someone who deserves to be recognised as a founder making waves in the startup landscape? Find out more about this weekly feature and how to get involved here.