Three years ago, Nigeria built a stock exchange board specifically for tech companies. Not one has listed on it.
The Nigerian Exchange launched its Technology Board in December 2022 with a clear pitch: let Nigerian tech companies raise capital at home instead of flying to New York or London every time they need growth funding. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved the rules. NGX carved out two segments, one for startups worth $1 million to $100 million and a bigger one for companies worth up to $1 billion. Everything was in place except the companies.
That absence is not an accident, and it is not simply a failure of imagination on the part of Nigerian founders, though that is the easy story to tell. It is the predictable outcome of a market structure that has given founders, investors, and the exchange itself very good reasons to keep looking outward.
The “Raise Abroad, Scale Abroad, Exit Abroad” Trap
For most of the last decade, the playbook for a Nigerian tech founder chasing scale has been consistent. Raise dollars from Silicon Valley or European funds. Build a business that serves Nigerian users but reports in dollars to satisfy those investors. Exit, eventually, through an acquisition or a foreign listing, so the people who put in the early capital can get dollars back out. Nigeria’s ICT sector contributed nearly 20% of GDP by late 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, and the country’s startups pulled in more than $1.18 billion in venture funding that year. Almost none of that wealth creation has translated into shares that an ordinary Nigerian investor can buy.
A new report from venture law practice TLP Advisory, based on interviews with founders, investors, and capital markets stakeholders, puts numbers on why. More than half of the founders surveyed admitted they do not understand how the NGX listing process actually works. Over two-thirds cited currency mismatch as the dominant reason they would not consider it: their venture funding arrived in dollars, their investors expect dollar returns, and the naira has lost more than 65% of its value since it was floated in 2023. Listing locally, in that light, looks less like patriotism and more like exposing your own balance sheet to a currency you can’t control.
Dolapo Morgan of Ventures Platform, one of the more established Nigerian venture firms, put it bluntly to researchers: VCs simply do not factor a local IPO into their investment thesis. It is treated as a one-in-a-hundred outcome, not a real exit path. That is a damning admission from inside the ecosystem the Tech Board was built to serve. Ventures Platform closed a Pan-African Fund II at $84 million this month, capital that will almost certainly be deployed with the same offshore exit assumptions baked in.
The Case for Staying Offshore
It would be unfair to frame this purely as founders and investors abandoning home soil out of habit. The arguments for a foreign listing are real. Deeper capital pools, stronger analyst coverage, and the prestige attached to a New York or London listing genuinely matter for a company with global ambitions. Dollar-denominated reporting protects investors from exactly the currency risk that has hammered the naira. And Nigeria’s own capital market has, until recently, given founders little reason to trust it: aside from MTN Nigeria, tech companies that have listed on the exchange have mostly underperformed, reinforcing the idea that NGX is a market for banks, telcos, and consumer goods giants, not software companies.
There is also a valuation problem the report doesn’t shy away from. A decade of easy global capital pushed Nigerian startup valuations well ahead of their naira-denominated revenue, and investors who bought in at those prices have little appetite for a listing process that would force a public reckoning with what the business is actually worth today.
Why the Excuses Are Running Out
But two things have shifted in 2026 that make the zero-listing status quo harder to defend. First, the exchange itself has had a genuinely strong year. NGX ranked as the world’s second-best performing stock market in the first half of 2026, with its All-Share Index up 57% and total market capitalisation crossing ₦158 trillion by the end of July. That is not the profile of a market too shallow or too illiquid to support a serious tech listing.
Second, and more tellingly, OPay is reportedly doing exactly what the report says nobody does. The fintech giant, which processed $358 billion in transaction value in 2025 and derives 88% of its revenue from Nigeria, is weighing an NGX listing to run alongside its long-rumoured $4 billion US IPO. NGX Group CEO Temi Popoola has been publicly pushing President Bola Tinubu to encourage exactly this kind of dual listing, naming OPay and PalmPay directly. If OPay actually follows through, it would be the first meaningful test of whether a company built entirely on Nigerian revenue can give Nigerian pension funds and retail investors a stake in its upside without torching its valuation.
That test matters because the entire framing of “Nigerian tech” as an export product, Africa’s tech revolution went from $129 million in annual funding in 2016 to over $3 billion by 2025, has always depended on international capital flowing in and, eventually, flowing back out. Nigerian investors have mostly watched that cycle from outside the room, holding naira while the equity upside settled somewhere else.
What Actually Has to Change
The TLP report’s most useful contribution is refusing to let any single party off the hook. Founders need real education on what listing costs and requires, not vague awareness that a Tech Board exists. Investors need to stop treating dollar exits as the only acceptable outcome and start pricing in the possibility of naira-denominated liquidity. And NGX, per the report’s own framing, bears the largest share of responsibility for building a board and then failing to build any bridge to the founders it was meant to attract. A listing rulebook published in 2022 means little if more than half the addressable market still doesn’t understand how to use it in 2025.
Nigeria doesn’t need every startup to abandon foreign capital. It needs at least one credible domestic listing to prove the mechanism works, so that a Nigerian teacher or civil servant can eventually own a slice of the fintech company processing their salary payments. Until that happens, the Tech Board will remain what it has been since 2022: a well-intentioned shelf that nobody has taken anything down from.
