Adeyemi Ajao, is the first African ever to sell his startup for $100 Millions. It happened on August 4, 2010, when Telefonica took controls of 85% of his startup Tuenti, an invitation-only private social networking website for students and young people in Spain. Tuenti that has been referred to as the “Spanish Facebook”. The company has been started 4 years earlier, by Adeyemi Ajao (he was 22), and 4 of his friends. Tuenti boasts 14 million users and is the largest Invite-Only network in the world.

Adeyemi Ajao is born in southern Spain. His father is Nigerian and his mother is Spanish. He lived in Nigeria for six years, spent two years in Italy and then moved to Spain when he was nine. He grew up in a little town called Marbella, the beach town.

Adeyemi earned a Masters in Finance from Emory, a J.D. from ICADE in Madrid, and an MBA from Stanford, and graduated at the top of his class at each university. He was elected one of the “Top 100 Spaniards of the Year” in 2009, and was invited by the U.S. Congress to the Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama as a representative of the Spanish Commission for Accomplishments in Entrepreneurship.

Adeyemi’s father was one of the first mechanical engineers in Nigeria, who started a steel company in Nigeria. He saw his father fought hard to put his company together, but unfortunately didn’t make it in Nigeria, and left for Italy.

“My father managed to establish his company in Europe and was very successful with it. Seeing him work so hard was inspiring. I think he always wanted me and my brother to do something along those lines. He trained us to be that way. Every meeting was like a business meeting. I have seen that lifestyle since I was very young.” said Adeyemi in an interview with sramanamitra.com.

Aside of Tuenti, Adeyemi Ajao has also started Jobandtalent.com, Spain’s #1 Elite Recruiting site. He is now co-founder and CEO of Identified.com, a social recruiting site, started in 2010, which has raised this summer $21 million in a Series B round of funding, with VantagePoint Capital Partners and Capricorn Investment Group. Identified had previously raised $1.5 million in Series A financing.

Identified uses Facebook data and game-like incentives to help 20-somethings identify and map out their early career goals. Identified is a career management 2.0 for millennials. The startup has attracted more than 10 million registered users, with 90 percent of them under the age of 29, the company reports. Identified is used by big companies like McKinsey, Google, and Disney, and is making about $5 millions in revenue.

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