Funke Opeke left New York to bring faster internet to Nigeria. Her company, MainOne, was acquired for 320 million dollars.
An electrical engineer who built a career at Verizon and MTN Nigeria, Funke Opeke founded MainOne in Lagos in 2008 to lay a submarine cable from Portugal to West Africa.
Funke Opeke grew up in Ibadan, one of nine children. Her father was the first Nigerian director of the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria and her mother was a teacher. She studied electrical engineering at the University of Ife, then at Columbia University, and built a career in New York as an executive director in Verizon’s wholesale division.
In 2005 she joined MTN Nigeria as chief technical officer. Then she looked at a country where internet access was limited and decided to do something about it.
MainOne
She founded MainOne in 2008. The company built a submarine cable system running from Portugal to West Africa, with landing stations in Nigeria, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. In 2015 it began operating a Tier III data centre in Lagos and extended its cable to Cameroon.
In December 2021 Equinix announced an agreement to acquire MainOne at an enterprise value of 320 million dollars. The acquisition completed in April 2022, and Opeke continued to lead the business until November 2024, when she became a strategic adviser.
Honours include CNBC All Africa Businesswoman of the Year in 2012, a place on Forbes’s list of the world’s top 50 women in tech in 2018, and Nigeria’s Officer of the Order of the Niger in 2022. The lesson: infrastructure is a hard business, and the founders who build it open the door for everyone else.
