In the class of young and upwardly mobile Nigerians with exceptional vision and drive is Temitope Ogunsemo. He’s the CEO of Krystal Digital, a fast-growing educational technology company that specialises in the creation, development and deployment of customised and service-oriented software applications for educational institutions in Nigeria.
Temitope Ogunsemo attended King’s College, Lagos, and the University of Ibadan, where he studied Industrial Chemistry before obtaining a Master’s in Information Management Systems from the University of Salford in the United Kingdom.
Although he had always believed in entrepreneurship and bade his time to embark on the journey of innovation in technological field, his difficult and frustrating experience when he attempted to get his academic transcript led to the birth of Krystal Digital in 2010. It was this experience which spurred his interest and potential in developing a school information management system that would improve the storage and retrieval of academic records and a forward looking idea for schools in the country to embrace digitization.
The company has since grown in leaps and bounds, with major corporate name recognition in strengthening the application of ICT in the education sector, particularly the basic and secondary education category.
Today, Krystal Digital’s flagship service, MySkool Portal, a web-based application for school information management system designed for proper storage and documentation of school data, has been adopted by more than 50 government-owned high schools in Nigeria and remarkably has more than 65,000 active student users. Krystal itself has more than 150 employees and annual revenue of more than $3 million.
Looking ahead, Temitope ties Krystal Digital’s aspiration to driving growth in the education sector by building a leading sub-saharan IT organisation, premising the overall quality of his company’s business model upon three inputs: the people, operations and innovation.
He expressed these variables to mean how critical the intellectual capital is to the provision of innovative solutions, to rely on the ability of his team to innovate and collaborate to develop value-adding solutions and an abiding commitment to conducting business in the most ethical manner and ensuring a positive impact on society.
In a rapidly advancing world of tech and innovation, it is gratifying that Krystal Digital is collaborating with Microsoft Imagine Academy programme, which provides quality education training resources on Microsoft technologies to help institutions, faculty, staff and students to obtain skills needed to reach their academic and career potential.
Temitope Ogunsemo, 35, is also of the view that such tech-induced transformation in the nation’s educational system is invaluable for development, adding that adoption of technologies in the classrooms will empower teachers to improve education outcomes, help bridge the digital divide and more importantly provide students with the education they need to transform into jobs in the knowledge economy.
Krystal Digital won the Tech Company of the Year at the Nigeria Technology Award in 2017 and won the Most Enterprising ICT Organisation at the Nigeria Entrepreneur Award in 2018.
Krystal Digital’s estimated worth is over “$3 million and rapidly expanding, which is a true reflection of the Nigerian “Can Do” spirit.