“The problem was much bigger than we anticipated it to be”: Day 1-1000 of Mida

Before Mida had a name, it existed as three separate ideas inside Renmoney, a Nigerian digital microfinance bank, where its three founders worked as colleagues, each unknowingly trying to solve the same problem.

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

From their respective roles, they saw the same weakness in digital lending. A lender could streamline the onboarding process, automate credit checks, and approve loans within minutes. But unless borrowers repaid those loans, none of those efficiencies mattered.

As they spoke with lenders beyond Renmoney, they realised the problem extended well beyond a single institution. Anibaba, who had begun consulting for other lending businesses, found that many were grappling with the same challenge: recovering overdue loans.

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

The opportunity was significant. Nigeria’s digital lending market is estimated to be worth $2.1 billion, while the number of licensed digital lenders grew from 173 in April 2023 to 461 by August 2025. However, as more Nigerians borrowed through digital platforms, defaults also increased. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s Q2 2025 Credit Conditions Survey reported rising default rates across both secured and unsecured lending. For Mida, the gap between issuing loans and recovering them represented a business opportunity.

Around July 2023, four months before Mida formally launched, Anibaba began building what would become the company’s minimum viable product (MVP) as a side project. He wanted to test whether the low recovery rates he had observed could be tackled differently.

“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 realised Anibaba had already begun building almost the same solution.

Rather than pursue three separate ideas, they combined their strengths. Anibaba brought the product he had already developed, while Egbi and Uzodinma contributed 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 lender platform operated by Links Microfinance Bank.

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

Mida’s launch was, in Egbi’s words, equal 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.

Mida’s original assumption was that lenders primarily wanted better tools to approve and disburse loans. Customer conversations 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.”

This forced Mida to rethink what it was building. In March 2024, the startup launched Mida Omni, an enterprise platform that combined digital collections, call-centre operations, portfolio segmentation, and reporting into a single system. The company launched MidaX two months later 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 explained that the evolution and growth of Mida exposed a weakness. Mida’s customer base kept expanding, but the business 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.”

Still, less than a year after launching, the startup stated that it signed on OxygenX, Access Holdings’ digital lending arm, as a customer. In July 2024, the company raised a $400,000 pre-seed round from Founders Factory Africa to expand its products and operations.

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

By then, Mida began weaving AI throughout its credit infrastructure. The company noted that 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.

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

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

Three years after an experiment became a company, Mida said it has managed more than ₦100 billion ($73 million) in debt portfolios and recovered over ₦1 billion ($731,000) in bad loans. It 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 conversations are underway to establish a presence in Ghana and Kenya.

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