From a Lagos Living Room to Hosting Bill Gates: Arnergy Founder Femi Adeyemo Steps Down After 13 Years

Femi Adeyemo, who founded Nigerian solar energy company Arnergy and led it for 13 years, has stepped down as chief executive. He announced the move in a LinkedIn post on Friday.

Ernest Eguasa is now leading the company as interim CEO.

“Venture-backed founders should know when to step aside, and this was my time,” Adeyemo wrote. “I’ll be cheering loudly from the stands.”

He said he gave the board six months’ notice in April and worked with board leadership on an orderly handover.

An idea from the Middle East

The idea for Arnergy came to Adeyemo in the summer of 2011. He was a telecom engineer at the time and had seen operators in the Middle East run hard-to-reach towers on solar power. At home, he noted, Nigeria imported nearly all of its energy technology, and homes and businesses depended on generators.

He chose the name Arnergy and reserved the domain a few months later. In August 2013 he incorporated the company and started working out of a living room in Lagos. Kunle Odebunmi joined a year later. Stephen Ozoigbo came on in 2015, first as an advisor.

Adeyemo says the company arrived before its market did. “We were too early,” he wrote. Arnergy bootstrapped for its first five years, and even then demand had not caught up.

“Keeping control meant staying small, and I didn’t want to keep it small,” he said.

That changed in 2019, when Breakthrough Energy Ventures led Arnergy’s Series A. Adeyemo said the fund’s offer persuaded him to rally his team to give up control. Arnergy became the fund’s first investment in emerging markets.

Two months after the deal, Adeyemo attended the first Breakthrough Energy conference. There he shared a room with Bill Gates, Vinod Khosla, John Doerr, Patrice Motsepe and other billionaires behind the fund. “Everything about how I saw my work, and myself, changed that week,” he wrote.

In 2023, as the market shifted, Gates toured Arnergy’s factory floor in Lagos.

Power across Nigeria

Adeyemo says Arnergy’s systems now power healthcare centres that cannot afford outages, more than 500 filling stations and thousands of homes in all 36 Nigerian states. The company also has systems in neighbouring Sub-Saharan African countries.

He said customers from 2014 still run their first systems, and most have added more. He credited this to a service team that “showed up on time, fixed the problem and followed up, in a country where good service is the exception, not the rule.”

He said Arnergy was meant to build things, not just fix power. Too many of his generation in telecom, he wrote, were “configuring systems designed somewhere else.” So Arnergy built its own technology in Lagos and trained people in finance, sales, deep tech engineering, service, software and operations.

Former Arnergy staff now lead teams across Nigeria and abroad, “all the way down under,” he said. “That may be what lasts longest.”

Adeyemo said the journey took “13 years of sacrifice, from me, from my family, and from a team that kept showing up.”

He thanked his co-founders Odebunmi and Ozoigbo, Arnergy’s customers, and Bank of Industry Limited, which he said backed the company first. He also thanked the investors who came in “before it was fashionable.” His strongest praise went to his staff: “You built this, and it is yours.”

“Arnergy is in good hands,” he wrote. He added that he will share what he is building next in the coming days.