Femi Aluko: The Sultan of Super.
How Chowdeck Is Navigating Nigeria’s Traffic, Tech, and Taste Buds.
You Don Chow?
Before food delivery became an app, it was a favor. You called a restaurant (if they had a phone), begged a friend with a bike, or convinced the office assistant to go and “help you manage.” It wasn’t logistics, it was improvisation.
The early 2010s brought the first formal platforms. Services like HelloFood (later rebranded as Jumia Food) introduced Nigerians to app-based ordering. The idea was solid, but the execution struggled. Riders got lost, orders arrived late (or never), and addresses were more of a puzzle than a location.
For a while, Jumia Food led the space, mostly by default. Other apps came and went, but none could crack the last-mile delivery chaos. Then came COVID-19 in 2020. Suddenly, food delivery wasn’t just a convenience, it was a necessity. And the cracks in the system became impossible to ignore.
That’s when a new wave of startups emerged, built not just for customers, but for Nigeria’s uniquely difficult infrastructure. Among them was Chowdeck, founded in 2021 by Femi Aluko, a former Paystack engineer turned hungry visionary. Unlike the earlier players, Chowdeck focused on what actually mattered: speed, consistency, and in-house logistics designed for Nigerian cities, not imported from elsewhere.
Now, food delivery has moved from luxury to lifestyle. And for the first time, it actually works, not perfectly, but reliably. In Nigeria, that’s progress. Let’s talk about Femi Aluko, a man who went from writing backend code in the shadows to running one of Nigeria’s most visible tech startups. If Nigeria had a Mount Rushmore for tech founders, Femi’s face would be there, probably wearing a hoodie and holding a laptop.
The Sultan
Femi Aluko is a Nigerian tech entrepreneur and software engineer, he is the co-founder and CEO of Chowdeck. He was born on March 31, 1993. He grew up in Akesan, a small village in Alimosho LGA, Lagos state. Femi graduated with top honors from Obafemi Awolowo University, where he studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering and was named the department’s best graduating student in Telecommunications option.
His early career saw him in roles across engineering firms and startups like Toptech Engineering Ltd, Hutbay, and Softblue Nigeria. But the real shift came in 2017 when he joined Paystack, then a small but promising fintech startup. He was the fifth engineer to join and the first to focus fully on core payment systems, meaning he was one of the people responsible for making sure money moved reliably, securely, and at scale. No pressure.
Over the next four years, Femi rose through the ranks at Paystack, holding titles like Senior Software Engineer, Technical Lead, Engineering Manager, and eventually Principal Engineer. He helped build and scale the infrastructure that handled tens of thousands of transactions daily, playing a key role in Paystack’s success and eventual $200 million acquisition by Stripe in 2020, a landmark deal in Africa’s tech history.
In 2020, while recovering from COVID-19, he found himself stuck at home and unable to get food delivered, a seemingly small frustration that revealed a massive logistical gap. A few months later, while in Dubai, he saw how seamless food delivery could be. That contrast lit the spark for what would become Chowdeck.
In October 2021, Femi teamed up with two other former Paystack engineers, Olumide Ojo (CTO) and Lanre Yusuf (COO) to launch Chowdeck, a food delivery platform designed specifically for Nigerian cities. As CEO, Femi brought his experience in systems engineering and real-time infrastructure to the world of dispatch riders, pepper soup, and GPS that occasionally lies.
Femi Aluko was honored in Nigerian CEO Magazine’s “40 Under 40 CEOs” list in December 2024. He won the Future Awards Africa 2024 in the Technology category for his innovation and impact through Chowdeck.
He has featured in prominent tech platforms and interviews, inspiring young African entrepreneurs and engineers including Meta youth summit in November 2024, and continues pushing Chowdeck beyond food into what could eventually be a super-app for everyday needs in Africa.
Chowdeck
Chowdeck is an app, yes. But it’s also a coping mechanism. Created in 2021 by Femi Aluko, it delivers food to your door in under 30 minutes (assuming weather, spirits, and road conditions all align).
When Chowdeck launched in 2021, it wasn’t trying to be fancy, it was trying to be functional. Built for the uniquely frustrating chaos of Nigerian cities, it asked a simple question: What if food delivery actually worked here? The result is a platform that blends engineering, logistics, and hunger management into one surprisingly efficient machine.
The Core Concept
Chowdeck was never just about getting food from Point A to Point B. It’s about solving the logistical nightmare that comes between cravings and convenience. From erratic traffic to inconsistent restaurant operations, Chowdeck builds tech-enabled systems that ensure meals actually arrive, hot, fast, and without five phone calls and a lost dispatch rider.
But it's more than just food delivery. Chowdeck is evolving into an operating system for merchants and everyday urban consumers, offering infrastructure where there was none before.
Who It’s For
Chowdeck serves the modern Nigerian — someone too busy, too tired, or too traffic-stranded to cook. Its users include:
Office workers who don’t have time to queue during lunch.
Students too focused on deadlines to light a stove.
Young professionals with full lives and empty fridges.
Vendors and restaurants looking for a stable, tech-supported delivery pipeline.
What Chowdeck Offers
At its core, Chowdeck offers on-demand meal delivery. But the company’s product suite has expanded to cover the entire last-mile food commerce chain:
Meal delivery from hundreds of local restaurants
Rider logistics with real-time tracking
Restaurant tools, such as Chowdeck Merchant App for order management
Inventory & sales tracking (through Mira POS integration)
Digital storefronts for vendors without websites
Grocery delivery and other essentials (in pilot or early rollout stages)
This growing stack positions Chowdeck not as a delivery app, but as a full-blown logistics-as-a-service platform for Nigeria’s food economy.
The company’s performance reads like a rap lyric:
Expanded to 8 Nigerian cities, including Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Ibadan.
Served over 1 million registered users
Completed ₦30 billion worth of deliveries in 2024
3,000+ active delivery riders braving rain, sun, and Lagos traffic for your lunch.
Raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Goodwater Capital, Goat Capital, and others big name investors that finally understood that Nigerians eat a lot.
The Mira Acquisition
In June 2025, Chowdeck acquired Mira, a point-of-sale (POS) startup used by over 500 restaurants to manage payments, sales, and inventory. The deal deepens Chowdeck’s merchant infrastructure by giving vendors better visibility and control, not just over delivery, but over their entire operation.
As part of the acquisition, Mira’s CEO, Ted Oladele, joined Chowdeck as Head of Product, overseeing the integration of tools that help vendors track sales, manage stock, and run their operations more efficiently. In short, Chowdeck is no longer just about food logistics. It's building a complete digital back office for African restaurants.
Chowdeck has contributed to the growth of a lot of food businesses by making millions of deliveries on their behalf, one of such is Amoke Oge. Chowdeck recently celebrated Amoke Oge’s ceiling shattering over 500,000 deliveries with an average order of N4,600 culminating into over ₦2.3 Billion in sales.
Chowdeck didn’t invent food delivery in Nigeria, it just made it work. And with its expanding tech stack, strategic acquisitions, and merchant-first infrastructure, it’s positioning itself not just as a convenience platform, but as the invisible engine behind Africa’s food commerce future.
Final Clever Thought
This is where I should say something profound.
But honestly, has anyone ever won anything from the “Love Wheel”?
Please reach out with proof. Screenshots. Testimonies. An affidavit, if necessary.
I honestly think this is just the beginning for chowdeck