Founder & CEO Pagatech Tayo has over twelve years of experience in a variety of technical and business roles in High-tech and Private Equity. Tayo founded Pagatech in April 2009 with a strong belief that the mobile phone can be leveraged to reduce Africa’s dependency on cash and expand financial access to millions. Pagatech is launching its mobile payments service, Paga, in Nigeria in Q4 2010 and has plans to expand Paga beyond the Nigerian market.

Prior to starting Pagatech, Tayo was Vice President at Travant Capital Partners in Lagos,Nigeria. At Travant, Tayo was responsible for executing the firm’s investment strategy in West Africa. Prior to joining Travant, Tayo was a Manager, Corporate Development, at Cisco Systems in San Jose California. In that role, he was responsible for strategy, acquisitions, and private equity investments in four technology sectors – Virtual Computing, Application Networking, Security, and Network Management. Tayo helped lead Cisco’s investment expansion in Africa and led numerous acquisition and private equity investment opportunities. These include the $130m acquisition of Reactivity, and investments in Aquantia (10G Base-T, Series A), and Guardium (Database Security, Series C, sold to IBM). Tayo was also responsible for the private sale of 22% of Cisco’s South African operations to a consortium of investors. Tayo represented Cisco on the boards of Guardium and Credant Technologies (a Mobile Security start-up).

Prior to Cisco, Tayo was a Senior Consultant at Deloitte Consulting in the CRM and Technology practice. Tayo also worked at Biomorphic VLSI as a Semiconductor Chip Design Engineer and Event411 as a Software Engineer, two start-ups based in Los Angeles California.

Tayo earned his Bachelors of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, cum laude, from the University of Southern California. He also has a Masters in Business Administration from the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.