Collins Onuegbu has been in tech for a long time. He founded his company, Signal Alliance, in the mid-1990s, providing enterprise software to a variety of companies in Nigeria. He has seen the dot-com boom and crash, and is generally skeptical of hype around the tech sector, which comes in ebbs and flows. However, he believes Nigeria’s current tech boom is different from the past — today, there is a budding support network around the tech firms. Accelerators, incubators, development finance institutions (DFIs), pitch competitions and funders have all contributed to the creation of a more substantial scene. And Onuegbu is doing his best to bolster it, as Director of Lagos Angel Network (LAN), along with his LAN colleagues.

It is not easy to promote the tech sector as an attractive investment opportunity, especially when government bonds and real estate provide high returns with relatively little risk. Slowly but surely, however, Onuegbu has managed to recruit dozens of angels to join his network, and it is getting increasingly easier to get in front of people to explain tech investing. Now, what the sector needs is some high-profile success stories.