Triple Trouble: The Curious Case Of The Ouster And The Oddities At Lidya

A couple of months ago, one founder’s curious statement raised eyebrows in the African startup/venture capital scene, and the words go something like this;

“I didn’t leave Lidya to pursue other projects. The existing investors took control of the company in an unjust manner. Therefore, I’m currently litigating them in the U.S.”

Those words make up Ercin Eksin’s unvarnished statement, included as an update to a TechCrunch article dated July 7, 2021, announcing Lidya’s USD 8.3 Mn pre-Series B raise while also casually mentioning that Eksin had “left Lidya to pursue other projects.” Eksin had rebutted.

When the above comment from Eksin (the Belgian national who had co-led the Nigeria-born SME financing startup known as Lidya as Co-Founder/Co-CEO since 2016) became public in July this year, it raised a lot of questions and virtually no concrete answers, naturally.

So, what really played out at Lidya? What sort of dispute culminated in Eksin leaving the startup under circumstan...