ABOUT

Yinusa Yakubu Temitope

Founder, systems builder, and Chief Executive Officer of Connected Intelligence.

Yinusa Yakubu Temitope is a Nigerian computer scientist, entrepreneur, and systems builder concerned with the architectures that allow ambitious work to endure. His work spans artificial intelligence, energy, connectivity, agriculture, food systems, and institutional design. Across these fields he returns to one recurring problem: how people and institutions can coordinate complex work without losing clarity, judgment, or the ability to learn.

Where the work began

The work began with a question on a sweltering Lagos afternoon. A taxi driver asked about the rising heat, and in that moment climate change and food insecurity stopped being distant ideas. They were problems facing farmers and communities that day. Yinusa has built from that conviction since: use what is available, whether old phones, sensors, solar panels, or simple data, and turn it into practical systems that help people grow, store, and sell what they produce.

FarmCI Technology Limited

Yinusa founded FarmCI Technology Limited, formerly Farm Central Intelligence, in 2022. It began as a competition idea and became a sustained effort to change how agricultural produce is preserved, processed, and valued in Nigeria. With a team of eight, he led the development of Interkool, a storage pod that extends shelf life and cuts post-harvest waste, and a community-based, decentralised freeze-drying system that lets producers preserve harvests close to the farm. He also led Factory in a Box, which combines low cost sensors and machine learning to monitor processing equipment and predict failures before they halt production. These systems were deployed at two sites and now support hundreds of people; in customer surveys, participating operations reported operating cost reductions of up to 30 percent.

In April 2026, Yinusa led Feeding the Next Billion, a five-day residential programme in agricultural value chains that trained 100 young people. It was funded by his UNESCO x Nestlé Youth Impact award and delivered with partners including EIT Food. FarmCI is now becoming a social impact organisation.

Connected Intelligence

Yinusa is the Chief Executive Officer of Connected Intelligence, an infrastructure technology company based in Lagos. Its premise is simple: every model, decision, and transaction runs on power, networks, and payment rails, and those rails must work before intelligence can. The company entered the energy sector through Halene, which gives prepaid electricity customers instant emergency credit at the meter, shows the fee before they accept, and recovers it on their next recharge, using the meters and vending systems utilities already run. Its second product, ThinNet, keeps one connectivity running across several networks for teams and systems that cannot afford to drop. The company is now expanding into renewable energy generation, with a longer view across broad infrastructure like connectivity, finance, data centres, and logistics.

SAINA

Yinusa is also developing SAINA, Synchronized Artificial Information and Networking of Automation: a protocol for reconciling the disparate data, information, and activity spread across systems into a continuously evolving intelligence layer. Its longer aim is a user-owned model of context, an accumulating record of the information a person controls, the decisions they make, and the patterns through which they work and reason.

People first

Yinusa's work has always included the people who will carry it forward. He co-founded Digital Amazonite, a digital education initiative that trained 100 young women across Nigerian tertiary institutions in technology and entrepreneurship. Through partnership with LEAP Africa, he directed digital transformation programmes for more than 200 entrepreneurs. Through the Enterprise for Youths in Agriculture programme at Soilless Farm Lab, he trained in protected agriculture and co-founded a farming venture with fellow trainees. His message to young builders is the one he lives by: use what you have, build what you need.

Recognition

• Startupper of the Year 2024, Innov’Up category, TotalEnergies, for Interkool by FarmCI.
• Winner, Category 2, FMN Prize for Innovation 3.0 (2024), selected from more than 400 applications.
• One of 10 winners of the EIT Food Education Start-up Award (2025).
• Top 100 Global Project Leaders, UNESCO x Nestlé Youth Impact initiative.
• Top 16 finalist, AfRise Challenge 2024.
• Overall winner, AFEX CodeCashCrop 4.0 (2023).

How he works

Yinusa examines difficult problems from first principles. He has worked across computer science, electronics, agriculture, energy, and entrepreneurship, not as separate interests but as different lenses on how systems behave. He looks for the structure beneath a problem, the incentives and constraints that sustain it, and a more durable alternative. His view of innovation is simple but demanding: it should solve something real, create leverage, and become useful to people.

He does not describe himself as someone who has figured it all out. He writes openly about failed experiments, ideas that did not become products, financial constraints, and the difficulty of turning recognition into a sustainable enterprise. In 2026, he declined master's offers in artificial intelligence from Newcastle University and Henley Business School at the University of Reading to keep building in Nigeria. His ambition is to contribute to a generation of African builders who create globally competitive technologies, companies, and institutions while staying grounded in African realities.

He is still experimenting. Still learning. Still building.