Adetunji ‘TeeJay‘ Opayele, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Nigerian retail automation startup Bumpa, has died following a car accident on March 5, 2025.
Opayele co-founded Bumpa in 2020 with Kelvin Umechukwu after the two met as students at Obafemi Awolowo University. The startup, which helps small businesses automate their retail operations, has grown significantly under their leadership, now employing 40 people and serving 60,000 SMEs with over 160 billion in processed transactions.
“He wasn’t just a cofounder to me; he was my friend, my brother, my fight partner, and a brilliant engineer,” Umechukwu said in an emotional statement. “This is honestly one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with in life.”
Before Bumpa, Opayele built an impressive career in software development, working in both Nigeria and the United States. He previously founded web hosting company HostCabal and held positions at Nigerian financial services provider E-Settlement.
Under Opayele’s technical leadership, Bumpa raised $4 million in seed funding in 2022 led by Base10 Partners, integrated with Meta platforms to enhance merchants’ messaging capabilities, and acquired beauty marketplace Fyne in 2023 and PaperCloud in 2025.
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Opeyemi Awoyemi, Partner at Fast-Forward Fund, a Bumpa investor, remembered Opayele as someone who “loved life and lived it to the fullest” with remarkable “tenacity” and “curiosity for life beyond work.“
To honor his legacy, Bumpa announced plans to develop an AI assistant named “Teejay” that will provide business insights and problem-solving support within the app, continuing the impactful work of its late co-founder.
