Jason Chukwuma Njoku is a British-Nigerian businessman born on 11 December 1980 in London, United Kingdom.
He is a co-founder and the CEO of iROKOtv, a service that offers Nigerian movies on demand.
Njoku, a self-described serial entrepreneur, launched iROKOtv on his eleventh try. After several failed businesses, he had the idea to start a new Nollywood distribution network while still living at home with his mother at the age of 30.
He went to school in London before relocating to a Nigerian community from the age of 12 to 15. As soon as he got back to the UK, he went to college to finish his A-Levels before getting accepted to The University of Manchester, where he studied Chemistry. With a 2:1, he earned his degree in 2005 and started Brash Magazine, a student publication that existed for three years before it was shut down in 2008.
Jason Njoku’s Careeer
After many unsuccessful businesses between 2005 and 2010, including a blog network, a T-shirt company, and a web design firm, Njoku returned home to live with his mother in Deptford. He had the notion to launch a Nollywood online distribution company there because, as Njoku puts it, “The West had Hulu and Netflix – Africa had nothing.” Having researched the business from a distance, he travelled to Lagos with the financial assistance of his best friend Bastian Gotter, a University of Manchester alumnus, and began buying the web rights to Nollywood films. He established a partnership with YouTube in Germany to serve as the official channel partner for the Nollywood organization, and he operated from a two-bedroom apartment in Festac Town, Lagos.
In 2010, Njoku and his former partner Bastian Gotter started the YouTube channel NollywoodLove, which became lucrative two months after its debut. Thanks to an article written at the time by Sarah Lacy for Tech Crunch, Tiger Global, a US-based venture capital firm looking to increase its presence in emerging markets, became aware of NollywoodLove the same year.
Series Tiger Global invested $3 million in the business in 2010, and on December 1, 2011, the company introduced iROKOtv, a standalone platform for video-on-demand movies. Viewers came from 178 different nations to the website. Since then, Njoku and Gotter have raised a total of $22 million from international venture capitalists, including Investment AB Kinnevik and RISE Capital. They have used the funds to open offices in Lagos, New York, and London, build a sizable film library of 5,000 films, and upgrade the company’s technological infrastructure. Iroko has traveled to make additional financial investments totaling $40 million.
To address the issues with Africa’s broadband infrastructure, Njoku opted to concentrate the company’s efforts on an Android mobile app rather than a streaming platform in 2015.
Awards and recognition
He was listed as one of the “Ten Young African Millionaires to Watch” by Forbes Africa in July 2012. Njoku won the CNBC All Africa Business Awards Young Leader of the Year for West Africa on August 29, 2013. He was also listed among the Top 1000 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company.
Spark
Along with his business partners Mary Remmy Njoku and Bastian Gotter, Njoku introduced Spark, a $2 million investment vehicle for Internet start-ups in Lagos, in August 2013. The company made its initial investments in 11 businesses, including the drinks distribution company Drinks.ng, the online real estate and rental agency ToLet.com.ng, and the hotel room booking website Hotels.ng, which later received a $1.2 million venture capital investment from the EchoVC Pan-Africa Fund and Omidyar Network. Jason Njoku made the official announcement in a blog post in 2015 that they were shuttering four startups that were deemed to be unsuccessful: Bus.com.ng (an online bus ticketing service), Insured.ng (an insurance comparison platform), Giddimint.com.ng (an online fashion store), and Christians.ng (an online dating site for Christians).
