Ngozi Dozie

Ngozi Dozie is best known as co-founder and Managing Director of Carbon, the Lagos-based fintech he built with his brother Chijioke Dozie. The company launched as a consumer-lending platform (originally Paylater / OneFi) and grew into a full-service Pan-African digital bank offering loans, payments, debit cards, bill payment and investment products via mobile. The Dozie brothers are the sons of the founders of Diamond Bank, and Carbon represents their bet on a digital-first, credit-led bank "for Africans and Africans in the diaspora."

His education and early career are unusually quantitative for a banker: a First-Class B.Sc. in Physics from Imperial College London, an MSc in Computation from the University of Oxford, and an MBA from The Wharton School (2004–2006). He is a qualified accountant and a CFA charterholder. Before founding companies, he worked as a risk consultant at Arthur Andersen in the UK, as a financial analyst at Deloitte, and as an investment banker at JPMorgan in New York.

On the investing side, Dozie co-founded Kaizen Venture Partners, through which he pursued "special situations" across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Rwanda, and he co-founded what he describes as Nigeria's first distressed-equity fund (KASSF), which raised roughly $20 million including capital from the International Finance Corporation (IFC). He also runs or has founded a string of other ventures — Café Neo (a coffee chain in Lagos and Kigali), a Rwanda coffee processing/export business, and a Mr. Biggs franchise — and today operates as managing partner of a family investment company focused on early-stage ventures. He is a frequent commentator and writer on African startup capital and serves as a contributor and speaker on the ecosystem (TechCabal, The Flip Africa, Financial Alliance for Women, and as faculty at VJAL AI).

• Invests at pre-seed/seed in early-stage African and diaspora-focused startups, typically as an operator-angel writing individual checks.
• Strong conviction that Africa needs more local capital: *"The truth is that we need more local investors. When we rely on foreign investors then we expose ourselves to imported problems."* He notes African startups tend to raise, incorporate and bank offshore, which leaves them exposed to global shocks (e.g., the SVB collapse).
• Frames the ecosystem's core problem as a "Seed to Series A gap" that is a *capital-design and ecosystem-architecture* challenge — not simply about more money or better founders, but about how venture capital is "designed, sequenced, and coordinated" for continuity rather than fragmentation. He reframes new fund managers as builders of "venture flow," not just first-check providers.
• Preaches focus and capital discipline to founders — advising teams to concentrate on core operations and control costs, especially in tight funding markets ("the paradox of focus for African entrepreneurs").
• Interested in non-obvious frontier sectors — has publicly argued founders should "consider the African gaming industry" — alongside fintech, Web3 and digital-inclusion plays.