Built to Process.
Designed to Scale.
Nexium was founded on a clear thesis: Nigeria's cassava wealth belongs in Nigerian factories, not in import lines.
Why We Built This
The observation was simple, and infuriating: Nigeria sits on the world's largest cassava production base, and spends over $500 million a year importing starch made from it.
The reasons are structural — inconsistent cassava aggregation, unreliable power, fragmented market access, and the absence of patient capital willing to build serious processing infrastructure. These are solvable problems. Nexium was built to solve them.
From the outset, our decision was to build at industrial scale — not to pilot, not to prove a concept, but to build the real thing. A 2.5 TPH processing plant is not a proof-of-concept. It is production-ready infrastructure, engineered for reliability, designed to run 16 hours a day, 300 days a year.
Ogbomoso was chosen deliberately — positioned at the heart of Oyo State's cassava belt, with road access to Lagos, Ibadan, and onward to national distribution routes. The Oyo State TransCom programme provided further validation, admitting Nexium to its investment facilitation framework in February 2026.
At maturity, Nexium is not just a starch plant. It is the anchor of a cassava value chain — providing a reliable market for thousands of smallholder farmers, creating skilled industrial employment, and demonstrating that Nigerian manufacturing can produce to global specification.
"Nigeria produces more cassava than any country on earth. Nexium turns that raw abundance into industrial-grade starch — closing a gap that has cost Nigeria billions in avoidable imports."
The Team Behind Nexium
Operators and builders — people who have done this before and know what it takes to execute in Nigerian manufacturing.
PORTRAIT — TOLU ADELOWO
Tolu Adelowo has spent twenty years building infrastructure that cannot fail — from real-time trading platforms processing billions in capital markets positions, to enterprise utility systems serving over one million customers, to the regulatory middleware underpinning a CBN-licensed financial services operation. That discipline — designing systems that run under pressure, to specification, day after day — is what he now brings to Nexium.
The move from technology infrastructure to agro-processing is more direct than it first appears. An industrial cassava starch plant is, at its core, a reliability and quality problem: consistent feedstock in, consistent specification out, 16 hours a day, 300 days a year. The engineering instinct to design for failure modes, the operational discipline to maintain throughput, and the governance rigour to satisfy institutional lenders — those are Tolu's primary professional credentials, accumulated across a career that happens to have been in technology.
At Yorkshire Water, he led enterprise digital transformation for a capital-intensive regulated utility with quality obligations, regulatory reporting, and a customer base of over one million — a closer analogue to running a processing operation than most manufacturing CVs. At Lansdowne Partners, he architected mission-critical trading infrastructure where downtime translated directly into financial loss. At Nolt Finance, as interim CTO, he delivered the enterprise platform for a CBN-regulated institution and navigated Nigeria's institutional due diligence environment firsthand.
His African commercial track record is built on execution, not exposure. As Founder and CEO of PlentyTechJobs.Africa and Managing Partner at Cousant, he built B2B businesses from first principles in capital-constrained markets — generating commercial outcomes without the benefit of mature infrastructure. He knows how Nigerian businesses actually operate, not just how they should.
Two board positions add direct industrial and compliance depth: Fechrad Engineering, where he engages at board level with procurement, contracting, and engineering operations; and Arthrimed Specialist Hospitals, where governance in a quality-critical regulated environment parallels the compliance demands of food-grade and pharma-eligible manufacturing. He holds an MEng from Imperial College London, a PGDip in Strategy & Innovation from Saïd Business School Oxford, and TOGAF Enterprise Architecture certification.
PORTRAIT — BUKOLA OLAIYA
Bukola is a senior Supply Chain and Operations leader with over 16 years of experience delivering large-scale operational performance across FMCG and manufacturing environments in Africa.
As Lead Consultant at Platigrace Ltd, she partners with growth-stage manufacturing businesses to design resilient supply chains, improve execution discipline, and enable scalable growth. Prior to this, she held senior supply chain leadership roles at Unilever and Flour Mills of Nigeria Plc — leading complex, multi-site operations and delivering measurable improvements in service levels, cost, and working capital.
She holds a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering and M.Sc. in Process Engineering from the University of Lagos, with APICS CPIM, CPSP, and CILT UK certifications.
Board Advisors
Institutional expertise in capital markets, governance, and Nigerian finance — guiding Nexium's strategy and investor relationships.
Babatunde Dada
CEO of Nolt Finance, a CBN-licensed fintech. Babatunde advises Nexium on capital structure, DFI relationships, and financial governance — bringing deep experience in Nigerian regulated finance and institutional capital.
Niyi Adenubi
Executive Director at VFD Group Plc. Niyi brings deep expertise in Nigerian capital markets, corporate governance, and institutional investor relations — advising Nexium on investor-ready structure and long-term capital strategy.
Our Values
Precision
Industrial starch demands exact specifications. We hold them — in our equipment selection, our quality protocols, and the data we share with buyers. Consistency is not a claim; it is an engineering output.
Partnership
Farmers, buyers, and investors win when Nexium wins. We build relationships that are structured for mutual benefit — fair cassava pricing, consistent product quality, and transparent investor reporting.
Transparency
We report what we measure, and we measure everything. Our investors, partners, and customers can expect accurate, timely, and honest information — not best-case projections dressed as facts.
Scale-Mindedness
Every decision is made with the next 10x in mind. We build processes, systems, and relationships that work at 2.5 TPH today and scale with us as Nexium grows — no short-cuts that limit future growth.
Our Plant
An industrial processing facility built to specification — not a pilot plant, not a prototype, but a full-scale production operation from Day 1.
| Processing Capacity | 2.5 Tonnes Per Hour (2.5 TPH) starch output |
| Cassava Input | 10 Tonnes Per Hour (25% starch yield) |
| Annual Output — Year 1 | 7,200 tonnes at 60% utilisation |
| Annual Output — Year 5 | 14,250 tonnes at 95% utilisation |
| Raw Material Input | 28,800 t/yr fresh cassava roots (Year 1) |
| Sourcing Radius | 50 km outgrower contract programme |
| Equipment Supplier | Chinese industrial equipment manufacturer — specialist cassava starch processing line (vendor selection in progress) |
| Power Requirement | 671 KW (dedicated diesel generation) |
| Water Requirement | ≤ 20 m³/hr |
| Steam Requirement | 2T/H at 1.25 MPa (industrial steam boiler, on-site) |
| Operating Schedule | 16 hours/day, 300 days/year (2 shifts) |
| Output Grade | Food-grade — ≥92% whiteness, ≥98% fineness, ≤14% moisture |
| Plant Location | Ogbomoso, Oyo State, Nigeria |
| Total Capital Investment | ₦4.85 Billion (~$3.24M at ₦1,500/$) |
| Quality Standards | Codex Alimentarius STAN 212-1999 · NIS compliant · NAFDAC pharma in progress |
Ready to Learn More?
Whether you're an investor, potential buyer, or cassava supplier — we'd like to speak with you.