A viral piggy bank, two weeks of building, and Nigeria’s biggest savings app
Odunayo Eweniyi and her co-founders pivoted from a struggling job-matching startup after a social media post about a broken piggy bank. PiggyVest now counts millions of Nigerians as savers.
The idea behind one of Nigeria’s best-known fintech companies started as a post on social media. A woman had saved ₦1,000 a day for a year, then smashed her piggy bank to see the total. The story spread, and one of Odunayo Eweniyi’s co-founders took it to their group chat with a question: could this be done digitally?
By Eweniyi’s own account, the team had an early working version about two weeks later. That is the version of events she has given in interviews; accounts of exactly when the company was founded vary slightly, with most sources placing PiggyVest’s launch in 2016.
From a job platform to a savings habit
Eweniyi graduated from Covenant University in 2013 with a first-class degree in computer engineering. She and several university classmates started PushCV, a platform for hiring and jobs. It worked, but it was not the business that would define them. The team scaled it back, and PiggyVest became the focus.
The product is easy to describe: it lets people set money aside automatically, lock it away for a goal, and earn a return. As chief operating officer, Eweniyi runs the operational side. By 2025, profiles reported the platform had reached around 5.5 million users, with some accounts putting the figure closer to six million.
Beyond one company
Eweniyi has used the visibility in other ways. She is a co-founder of the Feminist Coalition, which in 2020 raised funds for medical care and legal support during the End SARS protests against police brutality in Nigeria. In January 2021 she launched FirstCheck Africa with Eloho Oname, an angel platform that backs women-led startups.
The honours accumulated quickly: the Future Awards Africa Prize in Technology in 2018, a place on the Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 technology list in 2019, a spot on TIME’s Next 100 in 2021, and a Forbes Woman Africa award for technology and innovation in 2022.
What the story teaches
PiggyVest’s origin is a reminder that product insight often arrives sideways. The founders did not set out to build a bank. They noticed a behaviour, saving in small daily amounts, that millions of people already practised in the physical world, and removed the friction. The business they had been working on was not the one that worked, and they were willing to let it go.