Wale Ayeni leads the IFC’s Venture Capital practice focused on Africa – the International Finance Organization is part of the World Bank Group. The IFC’s Venture capital team invests in technology companies in frontier markets. IFC’s tech portfolio in Africa includes Andela, Bridge International Academies, Interswitch, Mobisol, Zoona, 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 startups across various technology sectors for Orange Digital Ventures in Silicon Valley with representative investments in the US including PayJoy(FinTech), Veniam(Mesh Networks), Chain (Blockchain), WEVR (Virtual Reality). He also led transactions on behalf of EchoVC (an early-stage Pan African tech fund) in Hotels.ng, and Printivo.
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.
