Profile of a Visionaire

Jason Njoku: A Self-proclaimed serial Entrepreneur

Jason Chukwuma Njoku is a British-born Nigerian entrepreneur, film magnate and African start-up investor. He is the co-founder and CEO of iROKOtv, one of the early video-on-demand movie platforms for Nigerian movies (also known as Nollywood).

He graduated in 2004 and launched Brash Magazine, a student publication which ran for two years, before it closed in 2005. After a number of failed enterprises between 2005-2010, which included a blog network, a t-shirt business and a web design company, He came up with the idea of launching a new distribution platform for Nollywood “iROKOtv”.

He started purchasing the online licenses of Nollywood movies, from a two bedroom apartment in Festac, Lagos, and struck a deal with YouTube in Germany to be the official Channel partner for Nollywood Company.

In 2010, Njoku and his best friend Bastian Gotter launched NollywoodLove, a YouTube channel, which was profitable within two months of launch. NollywoodLove caught the attention of US-based Venture Capital fund Tiger Global that same year, thanks to a prominent article by Sarah Lacy who worked at the time for Tech Crunch.

An investment of $3m was secured from Tiger Global in 2010 and the company launched a stand-alone video-on-demand movie platform, iROKOtv, on 1 December 2011. The site drew in viewers from 178 countries around the world.

Njoku and Gotter have since gone on to raise an additional $22M from international VCs, with inclusion from Investment AB Kinnevik and RISE Capital and have successfully used the investment to build an extensive film catalogue of 5,000 movies, launch offices in Lagos, New York and London and invest in improving the company’s technology resource.

In July 2012, he was cited by Forbes Africa as one of the ‘Ten Young African Millionaires to Watch.