For millions of Nigerians, an OTP is just a six-digit code that arrives on a phone when they are trying to complete a transaction.
But behind that seemingly simple message is a complicated infrastructure problem.
A bank customer trying to transfer money, a fintech user logging into an account or a merchant waiting for a payment confirmation may have only a few seconds of patience when an OTP fails to arrive. The customer rarely thinks about the network, messaging routes or the infrastructure responsible for delivering the message.
They blame the bank.
That invisible problem has become the foundation of a Lagos technology company that has spent the past nine years building infrastructure around one of the most easily overlooked parts of Africa’s digital economy.
Termii, founded in Lagos in 2017 by Emmanuel Gbolade, Ayomide Awe and Atinuke Idowu, started with a relatively straightforward proposition: help businesses communicate with their customers.
Today, the company says more than 16,000 businesses use its platform to send OTPs, transaction alerts, fraud notifications and other customer communications through SMS, voice, email and WhatsApp.
Its platform now reaches about 10 million Africans every month, while monthly message volumes have grown from about one million in its early years to more than 400 million.
The company has also raised $5.3 million in funding, including a $1.4 million seed round led by Kepple Africa Ventures and Future Africa, followed by a $3.65 million round.
What began as a messaging problem has therefore evolved into something much bigger: an infrastructure business sitting underneath banks, fintechs, payment companies and other digital businesses.
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The problem with the message that never arrives
At the centre of Termii’s business is a deceptively simple question: what happens when an important message does not arrive?
Industry estimates suggest that between 10 percent and 15 percent of users attempting OTP verification can be lost to silent SMS delivery failures. These are the messages that disappear without an obvious error, leaving the customer unsure whether to retry, wait or abandon the transaction altogether.
For financial services companies, the consequences can be significant.
A customer waiting for an OTP may abandon a transaction. A new user unable to verify a phone number may never complete registration. A fraud detection message that arrives too late may fail to serve its purpose.
And when a customer does not receive a transaction alert, the first assumption is rarely that the messaging infrastructure failed.
“Every OTP that fails is a customer who believes their money is gone. They do not call the telecom company. They call their bank, or they close the app and never come back,” Olajuwon Abayomi, Termii’s general manager for Nigeria, told BusinessDay at the Google office in Lagos.
That distinction is important because Nigeria’s digital financial system is processing increasingly large volumes of transactions while simultaneously dealing with fraud risks.
The Central Bank recorded N25.85 billion in actual digital payment fraud losses in 2025, compared with N37.57 billion in attempted fraud.
For Termii, communication reliability is therefore not simply about ensuring that an SMS arrives, it is about ensuring that a critical part of a digital transaction does not break down at the point where the customer needs certainty most.
From sending messages to predicting failure
Termii’s business has evolved significantly from its early days as a messaging startup.
The company now describes itself as an AI-native reliability infrastructure company.
Its systems monitor delivery routes across carriers, identify where messages are likely to fail and reroute communications before the customer notices a problem.
That means Termii is increasingly trying to solve the problem before it becomes visible.
“The best compliment our product gets is silence. When we do our job, nothing happens. The alert arrives, the transaction completes, and nobody thinks about us,” Abayomi said.
It is an unusual business model in a technology industry that often rewards visibility. A consumer knows the name of their bank, fintech or payment app. They may know the telecom operator providing their connection. But they are unlikely to know which company helped deliver the OTP that allowed the transaction to happen.
For Termii, that invisibility is part of the value proposition.
Building on unreliable rails
The company’s growth has not come without significant challenges.
Termii entered a market where its prospective customers included banks, telecom companies and financial technology companies, institutions that have little tolerance for failures in critical communications.
The challenge was made harder by the fact that Termii itself depended on underlying telecom infrastructure that could fail.
“We were building on roads that were still being built. You cannot promise a bank 99.9 percent delivery if the rails underneath you do not offer it. So we had to build the intelligence that makes unreliable rails behave reliably,” Abayomi said.
That became one of the company’s central bets. Instead of treating messaging as a simple process of sending an SMS from point A to point B, Termii built systems designed to monitor different delivery routes and respond when one route was likely to fail.
The result is a layer of infrastructure designed to sit between businesses and the complicated network of carriers and communication channels that connect them to customers.
Why banks and fintechs matter
The rise of digital banking and fintech in Nigeria has created a much larger market for this infrastructure.
A digital financial service cannot rely solely on the app interface. Customers still need OTPs to authenticate transactions, alerts to confirm payments, fraud notifications to warn them about suspicious activity and communication channels to recover accounts or complete onboarding.
The same applies to businesses outside financial services. As more African businesses move sales, payments and customer service online, communication becomes part of their operating infrastructure.
Termii is betting that businesses will increasingly outsource that complexity rather than build and maintain messaging infrastructure themselves.
“Every business in Africa is becoming a digital business, whether it planned to or not. The market woman taking transfers is running on the same rails as the bank. Our job is to make those rails work for both of them, at a price both of them can afford,” Abayomi said.
From one million messages to 400 million
The scale of Termii’s growth illustrates how quickly the underlying infrastructure requirement has changed.
In its early years, the company processed roughly one million messages a month. It now says that figure has risen to more than 400 million. Its customer base has also expanded to more than 16,000 businesses, while the platform reaches approximately 10 million Africans every month.
The company is no longer simply selling SMS delivery. It is positioning itself as infrastructure for the broader customer communication layer, supporting SMS, voice, email and WhatsApp.
That shift could be important as African companies increasingly compete on how quickly and reliably they can interact with customers.
The opportunity is particularly significant in markets where internet connectivity can be inconsistent and where SMS remains a critical bridge between digital services and consumers.
The Y Combinator bet
Termii’s journey also reflects the changing appetite for African infrastructure startups among international investors.
The company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, placing it among a growing group of African technology companies that have used global accelerator programmes to gain access to capital, networks and international markets.
It has since raised $5.3 million.
Termii is also an alumnus of the Google for Startups Accelerator Africa and uses Google Cloud as part of its AI infrastructure.
The funding has helped the company move beyond the original messaging proposition and invest in the systems required to operate at significantly larger scale.
But the bigger opportunity may not be SMS itself, it is the infrastructure layer underneath Africa’s digital businesses.
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The infrastructure nobody sees
The story of Termii points to a less visible side of Nigeria’s technology industry.
Much of the attention around African tech goes to consumer-facing companies like the banking apps, fintech platforms, e-commerce businesses and payment services that people interact with every day.
But underneath those companies is another layer of infrastructure. There are businesses handling payments, identity, cloud computing, data, cybersecurity and communications.
Termii belongs to that quieter category. Its customers may get the credit for the smooth user experience, but the company wants to ensure that critical communication does not become the point where that experience breaks.
That makes the failed OTP an unlikely starting point for an infrastructure business. What looks to a customer like a missing text message can represent a much larger failure somewhere in the digital transaction chain. Termii’s bet is that businesses will pay to make that failure increasingly rare.
Nine years after it was founded in Lagos, the company is processing more than 400 million messages a month and serving thousands of businesses across Africa.
The ambition is no longer simply to deliver an OTP, it is to become part of the infrastructure that makes Africa’s increasingly digital economy work, even when the networks underneath it do not always behave as expected, and perhaps the clearest measure of its success is that customers never notice it at all.
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