MoniePoint Startup Engineer Retires at 28, Gives Reason
Moniepoint startup engineer and Principal Software Engineer, Julian Dumebi Duru has retired aged 28, after 10yrs at the virtual bank.
Duru is behind the idea of virtual accounts which is now used across fintechs in Africa today.
Julian Dumebi DuruA UNILAG graduate who also attended the University’s secondary school, ISL, he finished #8 in 2009 WASCE in the entire country. Started coding at age 14 got pretty good from free lance jobs, until 2015 when a friend recommended him to Tosin Eniolorunda, Co-founder and Group CEO.
Initially he wanted to leave after his first 3 months, after a tough Fidelity Bank project they handled. Which was his first major project and it showed him he had a lot to learn. Which was overwhelming.
After that, he decided to withdraw a little from coding and then landed on DevOps, where he blossomed for a decade.
He joined Moniepoint during their TeamApt days, and started as a lead software engineer in February 2015, then grew to Automation Engineer in 2017.
In 2018 he became the Product Manager, until 2023 when he got moved to Abuja to work as the Software Architect, a role he relished for one year before the final promotion to Principal Engineer.
With more then 10million active users, last year October, Moniepoint raised $110M from investors in London, including Google, which made them a Unicorn (Valuation of $1bn). Prior, they had already raised $55M.
With this raise and the valuation status, Julian Dumebi Duru is walking away with atleast $850k (₦1.3bn) at least.
Which partially explains why he has now decided to work for “passion” henceforth. But, officially he’s gonna take a short break and work on his AI startup.
He said he stayed at Moniepoint despite poaching attempts, because they cared about him as a human not just about is work.
