Abel Adugam Ayuba is a 21-year-old founder who conceived a startup idea in the queue when buying food during his time at the university in Abuja, Nigeria. While on campus, after spending several minutes when he made an electronic transfer payment to cover a meal, he had to wait for close to 5 minutes for his payment to reflect in the food vendor’s account. He noticed many students had a similar challenge and thought of ways this process could be improved, especially after seeing about five people wait for their payments to reflect like him. Eureka! Through this challenge, VersusPay was born.  You can think of Versuspay as your smart money choice buddy that simplifies your payment experience by helping you make or receive payments easily through quick-response technology while helping you make smart spending decisions.

Today, VersusPay supports many Nigerians enjoying cashless and convenient payments through QR payments.


Abel developed a passion for software engineering as early as he was fifteen years old when he built a social media platform, Abelchat, housing close to a thousand users. This passion project gave him a boost in his soon to be tech career by affording him a three months internship with UpliftHub, a tech hub in Nigeria.

“I learnt a lot at UpliftHub, which gave me the courage to try new things and grow my skills in a lot of ways”

Abel Adugam Ayuba (CEO, VersusPay)

VersusPay was founded in late 2020 to provide a frictionless buying experience for customers of small businesses such as food vendors, convenience stores, and many others. 

What businesses are saying about VersusPay

Abel heard about Flutterwave and other payment gateways in 2017 when he was in his experimental stages and had the opportunity to try out different payment technology systems. Due to his stress-free experience and having the opportunity to facilitate payments with ease, Flutterwave was the go to product when it was time to select a payment partner.

“For a startup like VersusPay, we need a reliable infrastructure partner. Selecting Flutterwave as our payments partner has been the best decision because of its reliability and making processes without issues.”

Abel Adugam Ayuba (CEO, VersusPay)



The long-term vision of VersusPay is to build futuristic quick response payment systems and revolutionalise the QR code payment industry. Even though there is a massive challenge in Africa, especially concerning the understandability of how QR payments work, the VersusPay team seeks to strategically increase awareness across Africa of the QR mode of payment. 

Abel envisions a world where everyone finds convenience in paying with QR, and vendors easily accept QR payments.

Published by Owuraku Ohene Ampadu-Kissi

Senior Manager, Product Marketing