Barbara Iyayi
Barbara Iyayi is an experienced entrepreneur and investor with 20 years’ experience spanning venture capital, private equity, investment banking/M&A and technology. Barbara has founded, invested in, advised and taken board roles in FinTech, financial services and blockchain companies, in addition to VC and growth equity platforms globally.
She is the CEO and Co-Founder of Liquid Credit, an institutional-grade stablecoin payment liquidity platform for FinTechs in emerging markets global trade. She is also the Founder & Managing Partner of Unicorn Growth Capital, a pioneer VC fund for the future of finance, investing in blockchain-powered financial infrastructure. Unicorn Growth has invested in early-stage companies across stablecoin payments, real world asset tokenization and embedded finance, helping them scale across Africa and emerging markets with high crypto adoption. Barbara is also the Board Chair of Green Flare, that aims to transform gas flares into clean energy to power data centers (Bitcoin Mining & AI) backed by CMT Digital and Luxor.
Barbara was on the board of the Web Foundation, an international non-profit focused on digital equality, founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Previously, she was the Board Chair of Appzone, a leading regulated blockchain payments platform in Africa. She was also the Chief Growth Officer of Element, Inc - a pioneer of mobile deep learning (AI) and co-founded by Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and Turing Award Laureate, where she partnered with financial service providers and FinTechs across US, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Previously, Barbara was part of the founding team of Atlas Mara, an LSE listed financial services platform co-founded by Bob Diamond, ex-CEO of Barclays Bank, which was the first ever entity to raise over $1bn to invest in, operate and manage financial institutions in Africa. As the Regional Head for M&A & Investments, Barbara led acquisitions, investments and FinTech in banks in 7 countries in Africa.
Prior to Atlas Mara, Barbara worked on global transactions of over $15bn at various financial institutions, including as Vice President, Investment Banking at JPMorgan, New York, where amongst other transactions, she led IPOs for Delphi Automative (Aptiv PLC) and Nord Anglia Education. Prior to that, she worked at UBS Investment Bank and JPMorgan Private Bank in New York. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Columbia University, and an MBA at Harvard Business School.