Bluechip Technology is Expanding to Europe

African enterprise company, Bluechip Technologies, is the latest of African companies that have expanded to Europe. The few other companies that have achieved this fete include fintechs, Lidya and Korapay in Eastern Europe and the U.K., respectively.

Bluechip Technologies already partners with international original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Microsoft and Oracle and provides data warehousing solutions and enterprise applications to banks, telcos, and insurance firms.

In announcing its European launch, the Nigeria-based systems integrator said the strategic expansion positions it as a ‘new competitive entrant in the EU market offering data warehousing and analytics products as well as highly experienced senior data engineers from its Nigeria team as consultants for European firms.’

The company was co-founded by Olumide Soyombo and Kazeem Tewogbade in 2008. The former is one of Nigeria’s high-profile angel investors who launched a fund Volton Capital last year. Bluechip specializes in data warehousing, analytics, and enterprise systems for banks and telcos.

Bluechip’s data warehouse product collates data from disparate sources, translating them into information that gets businesses to understand trends such as customer lifetime value, churn and business analytics on gathered data. Telcos also use its simplex voucher management system to create airtime vouchers.

With its recently launched Primo Academy, a pipeline six-month program of data professionals (sort of like an Andela-esque model) for itself, local and international partners, Bluechip Technologies is also one of the few African tech companies focusing on training and placing data professionals.

According to Soyombo, the post-pandemic trend in remote working, a critical shortage of tech talent and an increase in demand for managing data more efficiently present a great opportunity for his company to deliver specialized services in Europe (recent research projects the region’s big data and business analytics market size to hit $105 billion+ by 2027).

“We built this core enterprise business application for banks and telcos and the talent pool to address these needs. The whole play here is to be that systems integrator provider to the EU market. The pandemic has accelerated the need for that global flat workspace, and how to place those engineers while working with our partners like Oracle and Microsoft, and to do this cheaper than India or Eastern Europe,” said Soyombo as quoted by Techcrunch.

Bluechip’s growth over the past decade has almost mirrored the development of the African tech ecosystem and similar businesses in the same time frame despite the company not being venture-backed (its business is such that VC money isn’t necessarily required to scale). For instance, when Andela launched in 2014, it only had physical hubs in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda to source, vet, and train engineers to be part of remote teams for international companies. However, after going fully remote, the unicorn saw a 750% increase in applicants outside Africa as it expanded to over 80 countries.