How Y Combinator-backed founder Taiwo Akinropo built a multi-billion-naira delivery business
Taiwo Akinropo started HeyFood not because he had a passion for food, but because he saw a broken system in need of a fix. While many entrepreneurs rushed to launch their startups in the competitive Lagos market, Akinropo chose to build his foundation in Ibadan. He focused on merchant payments and logistics, recognizing that food delivery was essentially a technical problem disguised as a service. By prioritizing prepaid digital wallets and tight unit economics, he built a business that processed over ₦6.1 billion in transactions long before the hype cycle arrived.
His decision to leave university after one year remains a defining moment. He was already building software that people needed, and he refused to wait for permission to scale. This practical approach served him well when HeyFood became the first African food delivery startup to join Y Combinator. The accelerator provided global credibility and a new network, but Akinropo maintains that the real work happened in the daily execution of operations and logistics in the local market.
Today, Akinropo has shifted his focus toward autonomous artificial intelligence. He is currently building products like Someone@, which aims to handle administrative tasks such as scheduling and communication. Unlike many current AI tools that require constant human prompting, his goal is to create systems that take an outcome and manage the necessary steps to complete it independently. He believes this level of automation should be accessible to everyone, not just those with high-level executive support.
The broader mission behind his current work is for Africa to participate in the creation of these technologies. He warns against a future where the continent only acts as a consumer of global products. Instead, he advocates for African engineers to design systems shaped by the reality of their own surroundings. For Akinropo, the strategy is consistent: look past the popular narrative and find the underlying problem that no one else has managed to solve yet.