From Medicine to Tech: Dr. Emmanuel Okeleji Is Revolutionizing HR in Africa

He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of SeamlessHR, a leading cloud-based human resources and payroll technology company serving businesses across Africa.

While many entrepreneurs in Africa have pivoted across industries, Dr. Okeleji’s journey stands out for how deliberately he bridged two worlds—medicine and technology—to address one of the most critical infrastructure gaps facing African businesses today: efficient HR management.

Born and raised in Nigeria, Okeleji had early exposure to the business world.

He grew up watching his father run a company and started sitting in on board meetings as early as eight years old.

This formative experience planted the seed for his interest in entrepreneurship.

Despite this early exposure, he followed a conventional academic path and went on to study Medicine and Surgery at Obafemi Awolowo University, one of Nigeria’s leading medical institutions.

While in medical school, Emmanuel took what some might consider an unusual detour—an internship with Goldman Sachs in London.

That experience opened his eyes to the world of finance, strategy, and systems thinking.

Though brief, it deepened his understanding of how businesses function at a high level and further fueled his interest in creating solutions that could serve large enterprises.

The idea that technology could drive systemic change in Africa began to take root during this time.

After completing his degree, Dr. Okeleji began practicing medicine and completed a clinical stint at St. Nicholas Hospital in Lagos.

However, it became clear that his calling was not confined to the four walls of a hospital.

His entrepreneurial instincts, sharpened by years of observing businesses and his curiosity about problem-solving at scale, led him to explore technology.

In 2007, he teamed up with Deji Lana to launch Waressence, a software development company.

This marked his formal entry into tech. The duo wasn’t just building software; they were learning what African businesses truly needed.

In 2013, they co-founded Insidify, a job-matching platform designed to connect job seekers with employers in a more streamlined and data-driven way.

The platform gained traction, but as they worked closely with HR teams across different sectors, they realized that recruitment was just one piece of a much larger problem.

African businesses, especially medium to large enterprises, were struggling with managing people, tracking performance, and handling payroll.

The HR departments were often stuck with fragmented, manual processes that slowed down operations and exposed companies to costly errors.

That insight led to the bold pivot in 2018: they transformed Insidify into SeamlessHR, a full-suite HR and payroll software built specifically for the African context.

SeamlessHR quickly grew from a startup to one of the most recognized enterprise SaaS companies on the continent.

By 2023, the platform had processed over $311 million in payroll across multiple countries and was serving clients in industries ranging from banking to manufacturing.

The software offers solutions that cut across the employee lifecycle—from recruitment to onboarding, performance management, payroll, and compliance.

What makes SeamlessHR unique is not just the technology, but the local insight embedded into its design. It understands the regulatory complexities and operational nuances of doing business in Africa.

Through SeamlessHR, Dr. Okeleji is playing a pivotal role in strengthening Africa’s business infrastructure.

Efficient HR systems might not always make headlines, but they are essential for growth.

By digitizing and automating these systems, SeamlessHR is helping African companies become more productive, competitive, and compliant. This, in turn, enables them to scale sustainably and create more jobs.

Dr. Emmanuel Okeleji’s leadership has not gone unnoticed. He has received multiple awards, including the Visionary Leadership Award and the Human Capital Development Award from the Association of Elite Human Resource Professionals (AEHRP).