She is one of the few African women shaping the local cryptocurrency industry. With over six years in the industry, she has already garnered the trust of several investors. 

Ruth Iselema (photo) is a trained pharmacist and founder of crypto company Bitmama Inc, launched in 2016. Her crypto company offers two products.

The first product is an eponymous mobile (Android and iOS) app that allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Celo. The second one is Changera, “an International money transfer app that lets millions of people send and receive money in any currency around the world in a very fast, easy, and secure way.”

The name Bitmama comes from a combination of Bitcoin and mama. “I started learning about blockchain and cryptocurrencies earlier in 2015, through a friend and a couple of Telegram and WhatsApp groups I joined. Just as it is now, I turned out to be only one out of maybe two women in the space. Because most of the conversations happened online and we did not see one another physically, people assumed I was an elderly woman. So they started calling me ‘Bitmama’ — a combination of bitcoin and mama — and the name stuck,” she told Techpoint Africa.

The adventure started when she was scammed of NGN250,000 (about US$576) when trying to invest in cryptocurrencies. “Even though I did my due diligence, I still got scammed. So I decided this has to stop,” she explained.  

In September 2022, Ruth secured US$1.65 million in funding to scale beyond Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. The funding was added to the US$350,000 she raised in October 2021. Thanks to the overall financing, she wanted to build "Africa’s most user-friendly, innovative blockchain company."

In 2018, she was one of the beneficiaries of the Green House Lab accelerator program organized by Venture Garden Group. Between 2017 and 2018, she was the director of the tech company Venhub.  In late 2021, she made it to the media outlet Crypto Asset Buyer’s list of the Top 20 Individuals that shaped Nigeria’s blockchain & crypto industry that year. 

Melchior Koba