Inside Dependly with Joshua Olatunji: Building the infrastructure of verifiable trust for Africa’s digital economy
Global commerce, particularly cross-border engagement, is struggling with a pervasive and debilitating cost: execution uncertainty.
Global commerce, particularly cross-border engagement, is struggling with a pervasive and debilitating cost: execution uncertainty.
This problem is acutely felt by the African diaspora, who sent an estimated $96.4 billion in remittances in 2024 to Africa. A significant portion of this capital, estimated at 25 percent for savings and investment, flows toward high-value projects like real estate and construction, which account for about 30 percent of remittances in key markets like Nigeria.
However, this massive flow of funds is hampered by a critical gap: the inability to independently verify whether promised work was truly done, creating a barrier to converting sacrifice into verifiable dignity.
For years, many in the diaspora have funded homes, farms, construction projects, businesses, and family developments across Africa from thousands of miles away.
Money flows steadily through remittances and personal transfers, often sustained by trust alone. Yet beneath this current of faith, a deeper, silent deception festers, a systemic failure rarely chronicled in economic reports: the inability to independently verify whether promised work was ever truly done.
Across Nigeria and much of Africa’s expanding digital economy, billions move between parties operating with limited visibility into execution.
Contractors receive upfront payments for unfinished projects. Freelancers disappear after partial delivery. Procurement agreements collapse into disputes. Families abroad discover, sometimes too late, that retirement homes funded over decades exist only in photographs and assurances.
When these failures occur, accountability is often fragmented, informal, or entirely absent.
For Joshua Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Dependly, this trust deficit represents more than a social inconvenience. He believes it is one of the invisible structural frictions slowing economic confidence across emerging markets.
“Money already moves digitally,” Olatunji said. “The deeper problem is verification. People can send funds instantly, but they still struggle to prove whether obligations were actually fulfilled before capital is released.”
Founded in Nigeria, Dependly is building what it describes as a “verifiable trust layer” for contract execution; infrastructure that links payments directly to confirmed milestones rather than assumptions, verbal agreements, or unverified updates.
At its core, the platform transforms contracts into programmable workflows.
Users can structure agreements into defined milestones, assign approvers, and require evidence, including geo-stamped images, videos, inspection documents, or third-party validations, before funds are released. Rather than serving as a passive fund holding mechanism, Dependly orchestrates the broader lifecycle of execution itself: defining conditions, validating delivery, maintaining immutable audit trails, and automating disbursement when agreed obligations are fulfilled.
The company describes this model as “condition-based financial infrastructure,” where trust is no longer dependent on personal relationships alone, but reinforced through verifiable execution and shared visibility among stakeholders.
The implications extend beyond fintech. Nigeria remains one of Africa’s largest recipients of diaspora remittances, with billions of dollars flowing annually into construction, small business financing, education, agriculture, and family support. Yet much of this capital still operates through informal trust networks that provide limited oversight once funds are transferred.
Analysts argue that this lack of visibility discourages deeper long-term investment from diaspora communities and weakens confidence in cross-border project financing. Dependly believes verification infrastructure could change that.
The broader vision aligns closely with national economic priorities around improving the ease of doing business, supporting SMEs, and increasing transparency within the digital economy.
This commitment to auditable execution is crucial for supporting the government’s push toward a formalized economy, enhancing tax compliance, and strengthening the overall fiduciary standards required for global capital integration.⁴
The company is currently onboarding early users across multiple sectors, including construction, procurement, professional services, and cross-border project financing. It is also positioning its APIs for integration into financial institutions and enterprise systems seeking condition-gated capital deployment workflows.
Industry observers note that Dependly’s emergence reflects a broader evolution occurring within African financial technology itself.
The continent’s first fintech wave focused largely on digitizing payments and expanding financial access. A newer generation of infrastructure companies is now attempting to solve a more complex problem: how to create enforceable trust in distributed, digital, and cross-border transactions.
For Dependly, the answer lies in making verification programmable.
“Historically, business transactions in many markets have relied heavily on assumptions and goodwill” Olatunji said. “We believe the next phase of digital commerce will require systems where trust becomes measurable, auditable, and enforceable through infrastructure.”
That vision arrives at a time when remote work, diaspora-led investments, digital procurement, and globally distributed projects are increasingly becoming part of Africa’s commercial reality.
As these systems expand, the startup is betting that the future of financial infrastructure will not be defined solely by how quickly money moves, but by whether execution itself can be independently verified before capital changes hands.
And in economies where trust has often been treated as a social expectation rather than a technological standard, that shift could fundamentally redefine how business is conducted.
