When a discourse on African women in tech is about to be treated, the name of Nigeria’s cyber revolutionaire, Funke Opeke will be the true top-of-mind. After 20 years of working in the United States telecoms industry, Opeke returned to Nigeria to commence correcting the country’s connectivity problems. She initially joined the defunct NITEL where she learned satellites were just part of the problem.
As they say, women don’t wait for the future. Being a forward-thinking technologist, Opeke turned her engineer’s eye towards the ocean. So in 2008, armed with over $200 million in equity and debt investment, the former Verizon executive became a hands-on and by 2010, she has built MainOne into West Africa’s first privately-owned data centre, open access undersea high capacity cable submarine and laid 4,400 miles of fibre optic cable from Nigeria to Portugal. And big business quickly followed —online banking, booking services and retail websites.
To Opeke’s credit, Nigeria’s internet presence, once associated mostly with scams, now grew in size for international business opportunities. With accolades trailing that feat of digital change, within 12 years, Opeke successfully fostered MainOne into a 500-person team leading data centre and connectivity solutions provider —with a presence in Nigeria, Ghana and the Ivory Coast— and generate approximately $60 million annualized revenue.
Early this week, Equinix, the United States digital giants, announced its decision to acquire the same MainOne, in a deal expected to close Q1 of 2022, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions including the requisite regulatory approvals. The deal is for princely $320 million with the global digital infrastructure player trusting Opeke to continue to run MainOne as its CEO alongside her management team even after the acquisition is finalized.
Opeke obtained a masters degree in engineering from Columbia University and was named one of the World’s Top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes in 2018 for her efforts in sparking internet adoption. She was also recently named one of the Top 10 Women to Watch in the Data Centre Industry by Data Centre Magazine.