How Nugi Technologies built a decade of impact without Silicon Valley’s playbook

Ugi Augustine Ugi dreamt of becoming a medical doctor. Growing up in Calabar with sickle cell anaemia, medicine felt less like a career choice and more like a divine calling. His frequent visits have made hospitals familiar spaces. Survival demanded discipline.

The future, as he imagined it, wore a white coat with a stethoscope.

That plan unravelled quietly in a secondary school computer lab. An MTN technician had come to service the servers, Ugi, then the lab prefect stayed behind. He asked questions like, “How did the machines talk to each other?” What kept them running? The answers were ordinary, but the effect was not, and something shifted. Technology, not medicine, became the obsession.

That moment now sits at the root of Nugi Technologies, a software development company founded in Calabar in 2015. Ten years down the line, the company now boasts of more than 70 employees across four countries and has played a critical role in digitising government services in Cross River State.

Nugi Technologies has spent the last decade doing what most African startups avoid: building gradually, unattractive infrastructure, far from venture capital runways and Silicon Valley tropes.

Ugi chose technical education over medical school, trained as a software developer at NIIT, worked at an IT services firm in Calabar, and funded his ambitions through relentless hustle. One detour included winning a cash prize on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Later, he self-funded a degree in business systems and IT at Middlesex University in London.

By the time he returned to Nigeria, he was already running side projects and small contracts. He first launched GTCO Calscan, a software and marketing agency, and quietly tested ideas. In early 2015, at a moment when Nigeria’s economy was tightening, he formalised his thinking into a company.

He called it Nugi Technologies.

Building Nugi Technologies under constraints

The early version of Nugi Technologies bore little resemblance to today’s operation. It was a small team in Calabar, working with limited resources and fewer safety nets. No investors were waiting in the wings.

The market was unforgiving, and mistakes were expensive.

In 2019, Ugi made a calculated leap by moving the company’s headquarters to Lagos. The exposure attracted new clients, partnerships, and set the tone for Nugi Technologies’ upward trajectory. However, two years later, in 2021, the company moved back to Calabar.

That return was not nostalgia; it was strategy. “Lagos taught us speed,” he says. “Calabar is where we are building our future.”

From inception, Nugi Technologies was never designed as a single-product startup. Ugi’s instinct leaned toward systems. software as plumbing, not spectacle. Tools that governments and enterprises rely on quietly, every day.

That thinking now defines Nugi Group, the broader ecosystem that has grown around the company. It spans enterprise software, agricultural technology, clean energy, film production, and smart city development. The diversification was deliberate; each unit buffers the others.

When COVID-19 slowed government contracts, Nugi Farms kept revenue flowing. When energy costs spiked, early investments in solar absorbed the impact. This was not an accidental resilience; it was designed.

Ugi Augustine Ugi, founder and CEO of Nugi Technologies

On the software side, Nugi Technologies has assembled a comprehensive product suite. 360Gov handles government revenue and identity management. QLoop supports digital payments. Syncventory manages inventory. UltimePlus covers enterprise resource planning. Servyx powers service delivery. Cloudbridge sits beneath them all as the infrastructure layer.

Ugi spent several years embedded as a solutions architect with the Cross River State government. That proximity shaped both product and trust. The result was the deployment of 360Gov across the state.

By 2024, Cross River State’s internally generated revenue had surged to 60 per cent year-on-year. The work earned the state the “Most Innovative State” award. More importantly, it validated Nugi Technologies’ thesis.

When infrastructure compounds

Success in Cross River did not stay local. The company has since received enquiries from three other Nigerian states, as well as governments in Ghana, Kenya, and Rwanda. Growth, here, is cumulative rather than explosive.

Ugi is now extending that logic beyond software into physical infrastructure. The Greater Calabar City is a 370-hectare smart city project anchored by a Tier-4 data centre designed to never go down.

In a country where power outages are routine, the promise is refreshing. The facility will draw from hydro, solar, natural gas, and the national grid. The data centre alone is expected to create more than 1,000 jobs.

“The timing is right,” Ugi says. “We are mature enough to think in ecosystems, not products. A city is an economic engine.”

A founder takes stock

As Nugi Technologies turns ten, Ugi has turned 40. He has marked the moment by publishing a memoir, The Blood of the Phoenix. 

It opens with a hard-earned principle: “Pain births greatness. Don’t go looking for it, though. When pain comes uninvited and unapologetic, the question shouldn’t be ‘Why me?’ but ‘What now?’ You get the most out of your pain based on your reaction.”

Writing forced him to revisit experiences he had long suppressed, including the loss of a staff member in 2015.

“At the time, I swallowed the pain,” he writes. “When I finally wrote about it, that was when I mourned.”

Beyond grief, the book examines restraint. The decisions not to chase capital. Not to pivot for applause. Not to confuse speed with progress. Ugi’s definition of legacy is simple. Build people. Build things that last.

At 40, he calls this his decade of becoming. The first ten years proved survival; must prove endurance.

“We have enough unicorns,” he warns.. “We need elephants.”

Ten years on, Nugi Technologies is still moving. Slowly, deliberately, and very much on its own terms. 

The post How Nugi Technologies built a decade of impact without Silicon Valley’s playbook first appeared on Technext.