Co-founder exit, tech team collapse: Inside Lidya’s final months before shutdown

Lidya, the Nigerian digital lender that once promised to transform SME financing, the final act played out not in boardrooms or investor calls, but in unpaid salaries, silent codebases, and a string of high-profile departures.

BusinessDay learnt that the company’s collapse was preceded by months of internal hemorrhage, culminating in the exit of co-founder Tunde Kehinde in October 2024, the departure of Cristiano Machado, the chief technology officer a month earlier, and the complete disbandment of its Portugal-based tech team between May and September 2024, all as payroll obligations went unmet.

The end came via email. “Despite best efforts to restructure and sustain operations, the Company has encountered severe financial distress and is no longer able to continue in business.As a result, the Company has ceased all operations,” the message to customers read.

Read also: Lidya shuts down after raising $16.45m

For those inside Lidya’s final chapter, the warning signs had been flashing for months. Sources familiar with the company’s operations told BusinessDay that the Portugal engineering hub, critical to maintaining Lidya’s digital lending and loan recovery platform, began fracturing as early as May 2024.

Engineers stopped receiving salaries. Slack channels went dormant. Pull requests piled up unanswered. By September, the team had effectively dissolved, with remaining staff either resigning or being let go without severance.

The tech team’s collapse crippled Lidya Collect, the debt recovery product launched in 2023 as the company’s last-ditch pivot after abandoning its European expansion. Customers had already been reporting frozen funds and failed transactions for months.

Now, with no engineers to fix bugs or process withdrawals, the platform became a digital black hole.

The leadership exodus followed a familiar script. Cristiano Machado, the CTO who had overseen Lidya’s tech stack since its early days, left in September 2024. Tunde Kehinde, the public face of the company, a Jumia co-founder, and the architect of its data-driven lending vision, departed in October. Neither has commented publicly on their exits.

Their departures left Lidya without its technical brain and its most recognizable champion at a time when investor confidence was already evaporating. The $8.3 million pre-Series B round raised in 2021, once a badge of promise, had long been spent. The European adventure in Poland and the Czech Republic, launched with fanfare in 2020, ended in a quiet retreat by 2023.

“Nigeria’s tech-savvy lending ecosystem is the ideal launchpad for our solutions,” Kehinde had said then, framing the pullback as focus, not failure.

But focus requires fuel and Lidya was running on fumes. By the time the final email went out, the company admitted what employees and customers already knew: Due to the Company’s financial status, it is unable to process funds or settle claims at this time.