Before Mida became a company, it existed as three separate ideas inside Renmoney, a Nigerian digital microfinance bank where its three founders worked together while unknowingly trying to solve the same problem.

Mayowa Anibaba, Okeroghene Egbi, and Adija Uzodinma all held senior leadership roles at the lender. Anibaba led engineering, Egbi headed product and marketing, and Uzodinma oversaw IT and operations. Internally, they called themselves “the trio.”

From their different roles, they identified the same weakness in digital lending. A lender could simplify onboarding, automate credit checks, and approve loans within minutes. But if borrowers did not repay those loans, those operational efficiencies offered limited value.

As the trio engaged with lenders outside Renmoney, they realised the issue was not limited to one institution. Anibaba, who had started consulting for other lending businesses, found that many of them were struggling with the same challenge: recovering overdue loans.

The three founders left Renmoney within months of one another in 2023. In November 2023, they launched Mida, a startup that provides software and recovery services for lenders, including debt collection, borrower onboarding, and loan recovery tools.

The market opportunity was large. Nigeria’s digital lending market is estimated to be worth $2.1 billion, while the number of licensed digital lenders rose from 173 in April 2023 to 461 by August 2025. That increase followed the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s introduction of a licensing framework for digital money lenders in 2023, which formalised a previously loosely regulated sector. As more Nigerians accessed loans through digital platforms, defaults also increased. The Central Bank of Nigeria’s Q2 2025 Credit Conditions Survey reported rising default rates across both secured and unsecured lending. Elevated inflation and cost-of-living pressures in Nigeria have further strained household repayment capacity, making recovery infrastructure a growing priority for lenders rather than an afterthought. For Mida, the gap between issuing loans and recovering them became a business opportunity.

Day 1: An experiment becomes a company

Around July 2023, four months before Mida’s formal launch, Anibaba began building what would become the company’s minimum viable product, or MVP, as a side project. He wanted to test whether the low recovery rates he had observed could be addressed in a different way.

“I had been helping some other organisations that were trying to solve the same problem,” he said. “Apart from the fact that we’ve been working internally to solve this problem, this problem was much bigger than we anticipated it to be.”

Months later, while discussing a startup idea with Uzodinma, Egbi discovered that Anibaba had already started building almost the same solution. Instead of pursuing three separate ideas, the founders decided to combine their strengths. Anibaba brought the product he had already developed, while Egbi and Uzodinma added commercial, product, and operational experience from their years in lending.

In November 2023, users of Anibaba’s MVP migrated to Mida Collect, the company’s first commercial product. According to the founders, Mida officially launched after raising $50,000 from family and friends. Its first customer was Sofri, the digital lending platform operated by Links Microfinance Bank.

Mida says Sofri used its platform to improve collections, reduce missed repayments, and integrate collection workflows directly into its lending operations.

Egbi described Mida’s launch as a mix of excitement and apprehension. “But we were very excited because we had a vision and a path that we were going to get there,” she said.

Day 500: Software was not enough

Mida initially assumed lenders mainly wanted better tools for approving and disbursing loans. Conversations with customers quickly challenged that view.

“When we started, we weren’t planning on doing recovery,” Anibaba said. “But we realised that the biggest voices in the market at the time were saying, ‘I have so much bad debt. How do I recover this?’ That accelerated our recovery roadmap.”

That feedback pushed Mida to reconsider what it was building. In March 2024, the startup launched Mida Omni, an enterprise platform that brought digital collections, call-centre operations, portfolio segmentation, and reporting into one system. Two months later, the company launched MidaX to help recovery agents plan visits, locate borrowers through digital skip tracing, record field activity, and feed those updates back into lenders’ recovery operations.

“That’s how we evolved from thinking as a pure technology startup to realising we also had to offer services,” Anibaba said.

The founders said Mida’s growth also revealed a weakness in the business. Its customer base continued to expand, but the company remained heavily dependent on people-intensive recovery operations.

“Revenue was unpredictable, while payroll, technology infrastructure and operating costs had to be paid every month,” the company noted. “The hardest question was whether Mida could become a scalable technology company rather than simply a larger collections agency.”

The tension between building software and relying on human operations is a recurring challenge for African fintech startups operating in markets where digital infrastructure, credit bureau coverage, and physical address verification remain uneven. Even so, less than a year after launch, the startup said it had signed OxygenX, Access Holdings’ digital lending arm, as a customer. In July 2024, Mida raised a $400,000 pre-seed round from Founders Factory Africa to expand its products and operations.

Day 1000: Becoming infrastructure

In the third quarter of 2025, Mida completed the MVP for Mida Forms, a product that lets lenders configure customer onboarding, KYC checks, credit scoring, loan applications, offer letters, and approval workflows without lengthy technical integrations.

By that stage, Mida had begun embedding AI across its credit infrastructure. The company said it first used AI to enrich borrower data and improve lending decisions, before introducing an autonomous AI telecollector capable of calling borrowers and following up on overdue accounts. AI adoption has been accelerating across African fintech, with lending platforms using machine learning for credit scoring and fraud detection, though its application in debt collections has lagged behind origination.

Over time, Mida said it wants AI to predict which borrowers are likely to default, recommend the most suitable recovery strategy for each account, personalise customer engagement, and provide lenders with real-time recommendations across their portfolios.

As enterprise technology revenue began to increase, the company’s economics started to shift. Collections and recoveries grew without a matching rise in headcount, gross margins improved, and Mida became EBITDA positive in the first quarter of 2026, according to the company.

Three years after the initial experiment became a company, Mida said it has managed more than ₦100 billion ($73 million) in debt portfolios and recovered more than ₦1 billion ($731,000) in bad loans. The startup is now targeting a $1 million to $3 million seed round to deepen its AI capabilities and expand its API and embedded credit infrastructure. The company added that discussions are underway to establish a presence in Ghana and Kenya, two markets where digital lending has expanded significantly and where loan recovery infrastructure has not kept pace with origination growth.