He was almost a bricklayer. Now Amin Ajao is building in tech

Al-Amin Ajao graduated from Lagos State University in 2021 with an electronic and computer engineering degree and a self-taught coding practice he had built on the side — and he has spent the years since working his way from frontend roles at Nigerian fintechs to international companies, before turning to his own product. His ticketing startup, Bitooqoh, has processed ₦190 million in ticket sales and is now expanding into Kenya, per TechCabal.

Ajao entered LASU in 2016 with no clear plan to become a software engineer, according to TechCabal. He had picked the course because he liked science and had followed the lead of an older brother interested in computers. By his second year, he was writing code with friends, attending hackathons, and picking up freelance work. He completed industrial training at Divergent Innovation Hub in Ikoyi before graduation, and he and classmates attempted to build a campus delivery platform for LASU's Epe campus — a project that dissolved when everyone graduated.

After university, Ajao joined Woodcore, a Lagos-based fintech that provides core banking infrastructure for financial institutions, as a frontend engineer. He led frontend development, reviewed code, and mentored other engineers, per TechCabal. Woodcore also ran remotely, which showed him that working for international companies from Nigeria was viable. In 2022, he moved to Offscript, a Swedish company, as a senior software engineer, where he expanded into backend work and eventually became a full-stack engineer. Offscript was acquired by Superfiliate, a US-based creator-commerce software company, in early 2024, ending his tenure there. He then did freelance work before joining Aurio AI, a German company focused on automating talent sourcing for recruiters, as a frontend engineer. That contract ended in May 2025 when the company required on-site attendance in Germany and declined to sponsor his relocation from Nigeria.

Bitooqoh began as an internal tool. Ajao and friends used the existing ticketing platform TIX for a Lagos event they organised, then decided to build their own. Ajao led the engineering. The event went well enough that roughly 60 other organisers requested access to the platform through a form the team had set up — a signal they hadn't anticipated for what they'd built for themselves. They began onboarding external events and iterating based on organiser feedback. TechCabal reports the platform has since launched publicly and the team is now expanding into Kenya.

Ajao told TechCabal that running Bitooqoh shifted how he thinks about decision-making: at previous employers his role was execution; at Bitooqoh, the outcomes track back to his own calls. "It is never easy building a product," he said. "You are in charge of a lot of things, and the success of the project kind of lies in the decisions you make." He also worked briefly with Trotter, a company building tools to protect users from online threats such as phishing and social engineering, which deepened his interest in cybersecurity and AI-driven security tooling.

Over the next year, Ajao says his targets are pushing Bitooqoh's ticket-sales volume past ₦500 million and increasing his open-source contributions, per TechCabal. He has also flagged a longer-term interest in how AI can be applied to internet safety as hacking methods grow more sophisticated — an area shaped in part by ongoing conversations with his brother, who works in cybersecurity.