For Damilola Olokesusi, Shuttlers wasn’t born from a single idea. It grew out of years of navigating Lagos’ transport chaos, a family tragedy, and a vision for better mobility. In this edition of Meet the Founder, she shares how she built Shuttlers into a company that has raised over $5 million and completed more than 10 million trips.

From the outside, Lagos is often described as a city that never sleeps. But for the millions of people who wake before dawn each day, the city is better understood as a daily negotiation with time.

The average commuter spends hours battling traffic, squeezing into overcrowded buses and waiting for transport that may never arrive. For millions, the journey to work is the day’s first battle. Long before Damilola Olokesusi set out to fix that problem, she was fighting that same battle.

Those daily frustrations would become the foundation of Shuttlers, the shared mobility company that has completed more than 10 million trips, raised over $5 million, become Nigeria’s first private shared mobility platform integrated into Google Transit, and is quietly laying the groundwork for what Olokesusi hopes will become the operating system for urban mobility across Africa.The Birth of an Entrepreneur

If you’d met Damilola Olokesusi at 18, you probably wouldn’t have guessed she would one day build one of Africa’s best-known mobility startups. She wasn’t the child selling homemade products or sketching business ideas in a notebook. Entrepreneurship barely existed in her vocabulary.

She grew up in a family where success followed a far more predictable path. Her parents spent roughly three and a half decades in civil service, where success was measured by stability, dependable salaries and the certainty of a pension after retirement. Even her decision to study chemical engineering was influenced by older siblings who saw lucrative careers in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry.

But life has a habit of interrupting carefully written plans. When she was 19, a university strike brought her education to a halt. She planned to spend the time learning technology, but the course she wanted was too expensive, so she settled for a leadership programme instead.

It turned out to be the better investment, exposing her to ideas that fundamentally reshaped how she thought about work, purpose and impact.

The Birth of an Entrepreneur

If you’d met Damilola Olokesusi at 18, you probably wouldn’t have guessed she would one day build one of Africa’s best-known mobility startups. She wasn’t the child selling homemade products or sketching business ideas in a notebook. Entrepreneurship barely existed in her vocabulary.

She grew up in a family where success followed a far more predictable path. Her parents spent roughly three and a half decades in civil service, where success was measured by stability, dependable salaries and the certainty of a pension after retirement. Even her decision to study chemical engineering was influenced by older siblings who saw lucrative careers in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry.

But life has a habit of interrupting carefully written plans. When she was 19, a university strike brought her education to a halt. She planned to spend the time learning technology, but the course she wanted was too expensive, so she settled for a leadership programme instead. It turned out to be the better investment, exposing her to ideas that fundamentally reshaped how she thought about work, purpose and impact.

“I decided to make my life impactful. I thought entrepreneurship was the best way to truly make an impact, especially in Nigeria, where there are so many problems to solve. That was where the seed was sown, and from then on, I became hungry to find problems worth solving,” Olokesusi said.The Road to Shuttlers

Over the next few years, seemingly unrelated moments began to connect, each nudging her toward the company she would eventually buildFirst, during an internship at an oil and gas company, Olokesusi noticed something she couldn’t stop thinking about. Inside the company, staff buses picked employees up and dropped them off with clockwork precision.

But just outside the gates, Lagos was its usual self—crowded buses, endless queues and the daily uncertainty of getting from one place to another.

She wondered why reliable transportation had become a workplace privilege instead of an everyday expectation. After all, only a small fraction of Nigerian companies could afford organised staff buses, while millions of people navigated crowded terminals every day.

Yet even that observation alone wasn’t enough to inspire a company. Several experiences collided.

Although born in Lagos, Olokesusi grew up in Ibadan, where moving around alone came with far less anxiety.

“Returning to Lagos to study at the University of Lagos was a culture shock. I still remember my first danfo ride. The shouting and the chaos terrified me,” she recalled.

With time, she learned what millions of Lagos residents learn. She learned where to stand, who to follow and how to navigate the chaos. “But I never believed that was how people should have to live,” she said.

Then the chaos hit home. One of her sisters became a victim of one-chance, where criminals pose as commercial transport operators before robbing unsuspecting passengers. Although she survived, the incident changed how Olokesusi viewed public transport. “I had PTSD using public transport,” she said.

Not long after, another sister took her on a holiday to Dubai, where she experienced the city’s metro system for the first time. She watched people move through the city without fear, without the small calculations that every journey in Lagos seemed to require.

“I was amazed because some of the things I’d only seen in movies turned out not to be science fiction. Seeing an underground train emerge to the surface completely blew my mind,” she said.

Returning to Nigeria, she made herself a promise. If she had to commute in Lagos, she wanted to build a service she would gladly use herself.