Wale Ayeni is the Managing Partner of Helios Digital Ventures, an Africa-focused early-growth stage venture capital fund. Wale has over 18 years of global technology experience spanning several roles. Prior to joining Helios, he was at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, where he was head of direct venture capital investments across Africa, the Middle-East and Central Asia. During his time at the organization, he built its venture capital investment practice in Africa and co-headed disruptive technologies and VC investments for emerging and frontier markets globally, managing over $2.5B of venture assets.
Prior to joining the IFC, Wale led venture capital investments in Silicon Valley for Orange, the French telecoms company, focused on disruptive sectors including Fintech, Big-Data, Mesh Networks, Blockchain, and Virtual Reality. Wale started his finance career with J.P. Morgan's Technology Investment Banking group in San Francisco where he successfully executed over $12B worth of closed transactions spanning mergers & acquisitions to IPOs for large-cap technology clients including Facebook, Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Intel, AMD, and Shutterfly. Wale started his career as an engineer. At Intel, he was a microprocessor design engineer, where he led critical aspects of Intel's "CSI" chip architecture, the biggest micro-architecture change in Intel's history. He also led aspects of the very first "Snapdragon" chipsets working at Qualcomm's chip design center enabling the initial smartphone designs.