The Internet IPO

Delays a.k.a It's not gonna happen

Christmas is a time of gratitude.

I’m usually too cynical to think I’ve done anything worth recognising, but this week, I made the Zikoko Culture List for 2025 for the work I’ve done with Notadeepdive.

I couldn’t have done this without my family, who sometimes think I’m mad, but indulge the madness anyway.

Thank you to my close friends whom I won’t embarrass by mentioning (but special shoutout to Tega!)

Nnanna, whose thoughts and feedback help to make this newsletter better (subscribe to Fintech is Easy!)

ToluGrey and Adedeji Olowe for holding me to my promises and to tiringly great standards.

And you, dear reader.

The fact that you read, share, and talk about Notadeepdive in your public and private spaces is what makes it a thing worth celebrating. Thank you.

Also: I sometimes see our merch on people out in the wild, and it’s always ridiculously beautiful. (Giveaway soon?)

And the biggest thanks is to Credit Direct, who supported me throughout this year. They’re awesome! Click on their link, even if you’re just pretending.

TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT

Sustainable businesses aren’t built on process alone. They’re built on kept promises. At Credit Direct, that shows up as consistency: showing up when it matters and still being there after the moment has passed.

Continuity isn’t a campaign for us. It’s the job. So whether you’re planning for today or protecting tomorrow, we’re built to stay in the picture.

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Our Internet IPO

While the chatter about a Nigerian startup listing on the NGX only reached fever pitch in 2025, the internet service provider Tizeti has been flirting with the idea since August 2022.

Back then, CEO Kendall Ananyi spoke with the confidence of a man who had already seen the future, telling audiences the company had “reserved our ticker at NASDAQ” while simultaneously eyeing the Nigerian Exchange (NGX).’ A plan with a local backup.

The Nigerian Exchange is rarely the first choice for venture-backed startups. When startups go public, they want to go where liquidity lives and tech multiples are actually understood.

Consider the casualties of the global stage:

• Jumia: IPO’d at $14.50 (2019); spent years in the wilderness before a recent, fragile recovery.

• IHS Towers: Priced at $21 (2021); currently trading at $7.28.

• Swvl: Trading at $1.84, perpetually flirting with a NASDAQ delisting.

Going public is trading the soft, flattering ambiguity of private valuations for daily judgment from a market that won’t learn your context. It’s worse when your story is inbuilt with FX risk, political risk, thin coverage, and the “wait, what is your TAM?” questions every quarter (a.k.a African discount).

All of which is a long way of saying: Tizeti confirmed this week that its previously planned local IPO is on ice.

“Conversion of the company to a public company required formal approval from our Series A lead investor, 4DX Ventures. Despite repeated engagement, this approval was delayed for over five weeks… [so] we made the decision to shift the IPO… and file in the future.” - Kendall Ananyi

To understand why Tizeti’s NGX IPO always carried a question mark, let’s follow the money.

Founded in 2013, Tizeti, an internet service provider, raised $5.1m in disclosed equity funding, including a $3m Series A led by 4DX Ventures.

If we assume early investors own 25% of the company and require a $40m exit to justify a ten-year wait, the math demands a valuation north of ₦232 Billion ($160m).

It’s a big figure to ask the NGX to back. Will it have anything else to compare it to? Kinda.

Enter Legend Internet, the only comparable peer on the exchange. Legend listed by introduction in April 2025—a move that allows a company to join the club without the vulgarity of asking the public for new money. Legend’s FY2025 revenue sat at ₦1.19bn with a modest profit of ₦142.5m. Its market cap is a tidy ₦9.8bn, roughly 8x sales.

The divergence between the two is a tale of two infrastructures:

• Legend is a creature of brute force: Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH). It requires the sweat of digging trenches and the permanence of glass cables buried in the red earth of Abuja.

• Tizeti is a creature of the air: Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). It beams connectivity to rooftop receivers. It is nimble and fast to deploy, yet the market remains a romantic for the “moat” of physical fiber.

Which may be why Ananyi reframed Tizeti’s story this week as a “conversion from a wireless ISP to a fibre ISP,” and a continuation of FreeFiber.Africa, i.e., a deliberate move to the Legend model.

That shift and a few snippets (Tizeti is private, so the market doesn’t get clean audited numbers) let us sketch an intentionally rough comparison.

Metric Legend Internet (The Anchor) Tizeti (The Required Outcome)

Annual Revenue ₦1.19bn (FY 2025) ₦1.1bn (10-yr average)

Market Cap ₦9.8bn ($6.7m) ₦232bn ($160m)

Price-to-Sales ~8.2x ~210x

Even if Tizeti’s current revenue is a healthy ₦10bn, applying Legend’s 8x multiple only yields an ₦80bn valuation ($55m). At that price, once you translate the proceeds back into dollars, it looks less like a win and more like a retreat into capital preservation.

“Despite repeated engagement, this approval was delayed for over five weeks.”

Read between the lines: A dollar-based VC wants a dollar-shaped outcome.

By green-lighting an NGX IPO, investors would be consenting to a valuation that, in dollar terms, might be considered value-destructive. It is easier to let the company languish in the private limbo of the mid-market, hoping for a strategic buyout, than to crystallize a massive loss on a public ticker.

Despite understandable VC reluctance, the fibre pivot still means Tizeti needs capital even though the NGX is (temporarily) off the menu.

Tizeti must now avoid the ultimate Series A Trap: too venture-scaled to behave like a local business, yet operating with unit economics haunted by a currency environment that makes a public exit hard to justify.

As I wrote in “The IPOs That Never Came,” the dance floor that is the NGX tech board is empty not because the founders can’t dance, but because the VCs have done the math.

The year is almost over. If you’ve never left a comment, now is the time to do it!