HR as a Growth Engine: How Adebayo Aderohunmu Drove $86M Fundraising and Built Global Teams

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If companies truly believed their slogans, “people are our greatest asset” wouldn’t just be a dusty line on a poster in HR reception. 

Truth be told, too many organisations still treat human capital as a budget line to be squeezed rather than the force that drives growth. 

Gallup’s 2024 global workplace survey shows that only 21% of employees feel engaged at work, and disengagement costs the world nearly $8.8 trillion in lost productivity each year. For an age that prides itself on innovation, that’s a huge irony.

It takes a different kind of leader to flip that script, one who doesn’t see HR as a cost centre, but as the strategic engine of growth, resilience and sustainability. Adebayo Aderohunmu has built a career proving exactly that. 

From scaling Reliance Health’s workforce by over 300% in two years to driving LemFi’s expansion across 10+ countries while supporting its $86 million fundraising journey, his work shows how a thoughtful people and business strategy can change the direction of companies.

Adebayo commands the depth and approach of both an HR and Business Leader, whose approach blends apt research, technology, and empathy, while his ecosystem contributions reveal a dedication to paying it forward. 

In this conversation with Techeconomy, he opens up about his early inspirations, lessons from scaling global teams, and why the future of HR depends on building systems that go beyond managing people to actually empowering them.

TE: You’ve worked across multiple industries – from consulting, oil & gas, healthtech to fintech – what inspired your journey into HR, and how has your background shaped your approach today?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: My journey into HR was inspired first by related courses I did in my undergraduate degree, including industrial sociology, human resource management and the sociology of organisations. These courses made me understand and become deeply interested in the nature of human relations, roles within organisations, and how the productivity of organisations, and essentially our society, rests on human resources and how they are managed.

Research and academia in these courses, which I grew familiar with, established the centrality of human resources in organisations, its priority over other resources and research-backed methods to managing it effectively. Post my graduation, I chose to focus on a career in Human Resource Management. I have since over time, extended my learning in this field via certifications and my work experience. 

A lot I do is largely fed by that research, data and academic background. It has shaped my commitment to understand historical trends and future innovations in my field, curate research and academia-backed initiatives at work.  

Progressively, I have had the opportunity to work with HR Leaders who have also inspired my approach with their empathetic decision-making, impeccable execution and warm stakeholder management approach. 

TE: Looking back at your career trajectory, which role or project do you consider the turning point in establishing yourself as a global HR leader?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: It’s a company, or pretty much a project, Reliance Health. Working at Reliance Health marked my foray into Tech, a new approach to doing things in HR, and working with stakeholders across geographies. The role afforded me a great level of balanced autonomy and responsibility to own, curate and execute a number of talent acquisition and management projects that moved the company many leaps forward.

Projects I did in this space include a democratised competency-based and structured interviewing process, instituting an asynchronous internal learning system, supporting the building of an internal Performance Management System, curating an effective onboarding process for a global remote-first system, and recruiting globally across functions and seniority.

These projects meant the company could effectively recruit folks across the world, incrementally grow its workforce by over 300% in two years with spread across EMEA & APAC, onboard GTM and technical c-suite leadership,  increased revenue, raised the primed highest funding by an healthtech in Africa of $40m, doubled down on its market in Nigeria and expanded out of Nigeria into Egypt, etc. 

As an instance, I held the brief to recruit the VP of International Expansion at RH with so much glee as it marked such a next step in the company’s trajectory. With a great understanding of the brief, sourced and eventually hired a Super profile for the role. Down the line, this hire informed the company’s expansion into Egypt, of which I also held the reins in hiring the country’s leadership.

Did some great work here. Also got to win Employee of the Year, People Operations Team. 

Global HR Experience

TE: At LemFi, you managed a workforce of over 400 employees spread across 10+ countries. What are the biggest challenges of managing a distributed, multicultural workforce, and how did you overcome them?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: Managing such a distributed workforce had many challenges, among which were timezone syncs, employee productivity, communication and availability, team bonding and employee engagement, etc. Chief among these was the acculturation of new hires and employees in general. 

In a build fast, ship fast and scale fast environment, it is easy to forget the work is within an organisation and the individual employee and/or the new hire is part of a breathing whole.  Working with the team, a couple of the initiatives I did were:

1. Ensuring onboarding wasn’t just about work and work deliverables, but a larger introduction and absorption of the LemFi culture. 
2. A Quarterly Meet The Founder, where new hires at that time could have a chat with one of the founders. This was such an opportunity to share and ask questions about the mission, journey and behaviours at the company. 
3. Instituted a Culture/Engagement Champion Programme, where nominated colleagues served as culture ambassadors within different teams, who weren’t just mirrors of our culture but also had the soft responsibility to spread the culture markers, organise engagement and bonding events in their team, and generally work with the People Team and their Team Leads to foster a positive work culture. 

The surveyed and anecdotal feedback from these initiatives was warm and showed an impactful contribution. 

TE: Studies show that 77% of companies now use HR tech platforms to manage global teams. What merging lines between technology and HR Management have you explored, and what’s your opinion?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: Technology is a super phenomenon. Within my career, I have always had a bias towards the possibilities of technology, particularly within my areas of focus. This bias and putting it to work have made me some sort of SME on HR Technology in most of the places I have worked. 

In recruiting and managing people at scale, especially in global environments, which forms my work experience, I needed to grow an affinity for reigning in technological tools and platforms across various value chains in HR, from onboarding, recruitment, employee management, performance management, employee engagement, payroll, etc.

Across these lines, using a number of platforms helped ensure the companies were compliant per different geography of employee residence, could recruit and onboard at scale, asynchronously internally train employees, etc.

My pose to fellow professionals in this wise is to imagine the possibilities technology can offer to their work, and then go after it. You will most likely find what you are looking for. 

Impact & Achievements

TE: LemFi in the last 3 years has been on a super impressive growth and expansion trajectory, including raising $86m (Series A & B), deeper market expansion into Europe and the Americas, and the acquisition of two companies in the UK. What role did HR, in particular Talent Acquisition and Management, play in this?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: I believe LemFi is on such a wholesome trajectory that is hard to deny, energised by such a driven founding team, leadership team and the general workforce. As the CEO calls it, the company is on course to build the “Fullstack Financial Service for the Global South” diaspora. 

While many tend to tout HR as a cost centre, without immediate business results or contribution to the bottom line, otherwise is mostly the case. At LemFi, my team and I, including my manager and two other team members, did work that is hard not to see how we moved the needle of the business forward.

A lot of this work, albeit in the background, is running people operations, tempering chaos, company compliance across global legal entities, multi-geography payroll and benefits structuring and management,  recruiting and onboarding hires, etc. Two mantras that drove us as laid down by my manager – HR will not be a clog in the business wheel, and business and people’s priority was HR’s priority. 

Particularly, a couple of my individual contributions include working with departmental leaders and the IT Team to institute an onboarding system that supported the growth of the company across different geographies, crafting policies and processes that not just simplified our people processes but also ensured our financial regulatory compliance and access to licences, recruiting globally across teams to support GTM, engineering, product compliance and customer success, etc.

Coupled with the achievements you noted in your question, these inputs by me and the larger HR team are not too far from the company’s recent achievement of over $1 billion in monthly transactions, the acquisition of Pillar and expanded product lines and markets. 

TE: As on your LinkedIn profile, during your time at Reliance Health, you helped grow the workforce by over 300% in less than two years. What strategies or systems made that scale possible without losing cultural alignment?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: Thank you very much for that question. Aside from working extra hours and embracing the startup hustle culture, one system that the scale was built on was what I call a democratised, competency-based and structured recruitment process. An overarching highlight of that was enabling every employee of RH, post 6 months on the job, to adequately interview for cultural elements in a recruitment process. 

So, the typical traditional process in an organisation, or tech startups, is to have either the HR Manager, the recruiter or the company leadership interview candidates for cultural alignment with the company. As good as this process may be, it meant the “culture interviewer”, especially in a fast scaling organisation, was all logged on interviews for a number of hours a week, interviews lagging based on their availability and at times being drawn to other “more” priority projects/tasks. At RH, in the initial months, this obligation fell on me as the recruiter and obviously was not scalable. 

So, working together with the company leadership and asking a lot of “whys” on the traditional process, I instituted a process that trained and empowered all post-6-month term Rhomans (employees of RH) to adequately interview for cultural elements in interviews. A summation of this was identifying our culture markers, defining them as related to the company, creating questions and rubrics related to this, an interviewer training tutorial and guide, etc. Thus, spreading the task to over 100 employees, who were happy and glad to be part of the process to select and usher in new colleagues to the company. 

Big Ups to Google’s rework and Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules! That provided such a global guide.

TE: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is an evolving global priority, especially for companies. One of the companies you worked for, Stitch, seems to have a very credible focus on DEI. Did you get to play some part in this?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: Because a lot of the things we do as talent acquisition and management professionals feed off the direction and priority of the leadership. At Stitch, the leadership was very deliberate about a diverse and inclusive workforce, particularly at the levels of race and gender. The company had a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiative (DEII), to mirror the diverse market it serves and to further empower innovation and better outcomes for the company. 

Riding on this, I grew familiar with related communities, companies in mirroring localities where those talents were, and was willing to go the extra mile. This meant most times, going beyond the talent that was easily accessible for me, but looking for more. For instance, the brief for a black/coloured female Senior Software Engineer in South Africa meant dedicating more time to sourcing, reaching out via 2nd or 3rd LinkedIn connections, understanding the terrain, etc.

This also meant building a system that can support remote onboarding across and expanding talent markets into countries such as Togo and Kenya. I was glad to have been part of such a driven team, achieving 50% gender diversity and 40% racial diversity within the workforce. 

I joined the team as they were looking to expand into Nigeria and Kenya. In about two months, I hired a couple of senior software engineers and product managers from top companies within Africa to move its mission forward and and added a number of hires from other verticals such as compliance, product partnerships and data in subsequent months.

Though the Nigeria and Kenya expansion didn’t particularly pan out, not yet, happy to see how that contribution has grown the team, doubled down on its products in South Africa, made incredible acquisitions, increased revenue and raised funding rounds after. 

People, Culture & Leadership

TE: Employee engagement remains a global concern — Gallup’s 2024 report found that only 21% of employees worldwide feel engaged at work. From your experience, what truly drives engagement in distributed teams?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: What drives employee engagement is a decade-old burning question. Because employees are individually different, exist in different contexts, experience varied management styles even in the same company, etc. This dynamism becomes quite multiplied in a remote, distributed team. 

In my experience, an anchor that I have seen work in distributed teams is trust and autonomy. When companies build an environment, communication system and structure that sees employees as adults, engenders clear communication of expectations, provides the tools and enablement for achievement, and trusts employees to put in their best at work, the typical employee is attuned to work, the deliverables and the company’s vision. I believe this view has also been established by research by the NHS and CIPD. 

TE: Leadership training and coaching seem to be recurring parts of your work. Why is investing in mid-level leadership development so critical to long-term organisational success?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: It’s often said that children are the leaders of tomorrow. While mid-level managers aren’t children, they are indeed the leaders of the organisation tomorrow, and also very much now. Firstly, much of the operational burden and performance drive of organisations rests on the middle leadership, which is easy to see. A recent McKinsey research noted that organisations with middle managers who exhibit best-in-class behaviours generate 21x higher total shareholder returns (TSR) over five years than companies with weaker managers.  

Secondly, they sit in such a place to determine the culture and meaning of work in the organisation. Poor mid-level management will lead to quite disengaged employees, while great mid-level management is a catalyst for purposeful and aligned employees. Of course, they are also the pipeline of management leadership, who at the time of being at the midlevel, should be exposed to adequate management behaviours either via training, mentorship or coaching. 

Unfortunately, what you find in most companies, especially tech startups, is that mid-level managers are abandoned, assumed to know how to lead and inadequately supported. I believe this is one of the reasons for a number of toxic leadership behaviours and employee burnout we have around.

Future of HR & Technology

TE: With AI rapidly entering HR — from recruitment to performance tracking — do you see it as a threat or an opportunity for HR professionals?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: Seeing it as a threat will spell doom. Most importantly, it’s such a massive opportunity for HR professionals to expand their skillset, build transformative people processes and offer more value to the business and their people.

TE: The global HR tech market is projected to hit $63 billion by 2032. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in HR over the next decade? Again, if you were mentoring a young professional entering HR today, what three lessons from your own journey would you want them to take with them?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: The biggest opportunities over the next decade in HR Tech, especially with the incursion and integration of AI into many platforms, will be massive. I can easily identify two:

1. More than ever before, AI will provide an engine for Predictive HR  Analytics tools across different value chains – recruitment, performance, learning, etc.
2. Automation and interoperability of platforms. Automation tools for operational HR tasks are on the rise, but most are still within standalone platforms that don’t easily feed into each other; however, because a number of HR related data and tasks flow into each other, it causes some hard stops, hence not as smooth an automation or value. For instance, onboarding information feeds seamlessly into payroll, or performance flows into learning. Either in more open API access or other means, I see more interoperability in HR Tech. Of course, of note here is the need for data integrity and best data practices. 

Three hands, I will borrow a young professional new to talent activation and management:

1. Don’t be afraid to do the dirty work. A lot of the work that will build your competency, add to the business’s bottom line and make you proud in the long term is in the dirty work. 
2. Train your thought process and apply it on the job. Don’t be afraid to question the norms in practice you see around.
3. Be very familiar with business concepts, and see that you have a good understanding of what’s behind the hood of the company you are working for. 

Ecosystem Contribution

TE: Many leaders focus only on their organisations, but ecosystems thrive on collective effort. In what ways are you contributing to the growth of the wider tech and HR community, and what impact do you hope to leave behind?

Adebayo Aderohunmu: Leaving behind is a life question. But I do try my best to pay it forward in individual relationships and the larger ecosystem, and I find great value in doing so. One of the ways I do this is by supporting younger tech professionals who are looking to grow their careers and get the best jobs, through volunteering and mentorship in tech communities and platforms such as Uptick Talent, Code Your Future, etc. The feedback and success stories from this have been amazing, and I definitely look forward to doing more. 

Within the HR community, you will find me individually guiding professionals on how they can scale their contributions to the bottom line. More recently, I have been putting out topical and research-based articles in journals either individually or in collaboration with a couple of friends, on subject matter areas within HR that I believe are important for the profession in light of recent trends and technology, to help shape how we deliver value and add to the global HR knowledge base.