NEWS
Flutterwave makes TIME’s 100 most influential companies list
Nigerian unicorn startup, Flutterwave has made the TIME‘s 100 most influential companies globally, alongside companies like Tesla, Apple, and Duolingo, TopNaija reports.
Earlier today, TIME revealed the first-ever TIME100 Most Influential Companies, a new list—and an expansion of the annual TIME100 franchise—that highlights 100 businesses making an extraordinary impact around the world.
The co-founder and CEO of Nigeria’s Flutterwave, Olugbenga Agboola, compares the infrastructure of digital transactions across nations and platforms (think credit cards, debit payments and digital wallets) to plumbing: you don’t want to think about it, you just want it to work. When pandemic lockdowns hit brick-and-mortar businesses in Africa, the digital-payment service was able to rapidly set up digital storefronts for 20,000 customers, throwing them a lifeline. Agboola called the free campaign “keeping the lights on.”
The inaugural list features 64 companies headquartered in the United States: Home Depot, Mastercard, Nike, Mattel, Twitter, Johnson & Johnson, Epic Games, Rothy’s, AT&T, FedEx, Clubhouse, Airbnb, GoFundMe, Lime, Robinhood, Tesla and more.
18 companies on the list are headquartered in Europe: English Premier League, Equinor, Maersk, Volkswagen, Adidas, Lego, Farfetch, Stripe, Oatly, Unilever and more.
Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, CVS, Walgreens, and Illumina are among the companies on the list that are playing a critical role in COVID-19 prevention, vaccine creation and the vaccine rollout process.
Major tech companies—including Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei, Apple, Tencent, Nintendo, Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Zoom and more—are included on the list.
Several companies are in the financial technology industry, including Nubank, Alibaba, Mastercard, Robinhood, Stripe, Flutterwave and more. Some—such as Digital Currency Group and Coinbase—specialize in digital currency.
The entertainment industry is also represented on the list by a range of businesses, including Netflix, Spotify, TikTok, HYBE, and Disney.
The most recently founded company is Clubhouse, which was created in spring of 2020.
In March 2021, Flutterwave raised a US$ 170 million Series C funding round. At the time, this was the largest amount ever secured by an African tech startup and gave it a valuation of over US$1 billion, making Flutterwave a unicorn.
Investors in Flutterwave include Y-Combinator, Visa Ventures, Mastercard, Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global Management.
To assemble the list, TIME solicited nominations across every sector—including health care, entertainment, transportation, technology and more—from its global network of editors and correspondents, as well as from industry experts. Each company was then evaluated on key factors, including relevance, impact, innovation, leadership, ambition and success.
The TIME100 Most Influential Companies issue features 5 worldwide covers, each spotlighting a CEO from a company on the list with an in-depth profile, including: Reese Witherspoon of Hello Sunshine, Adam Silver of the National Basketball Association, Mary Barra of General Motors, Francis deSouza of Illumina, and Sara Menker of Gro Intelligence.
See the complete 2021 TIME100 Most Influential Companies list: time.com/100companies
