By Amarachi Okonji

Victory Okoyomoh had always been clear about one thing: he was never going to start a company.

He had said it to friends. He had said it to family. Over six years of working in communications and content strategy, helping founders across fintech, solar energy, beauty, music, and drone technology find and tell their stories, he had watched enough people start things to know he did not want to be one of them. He would do the work. He would stay behind the scenes. He would not build.

Then, in early 2025, he picked up his phone, hit record, and told the internet he was building Rubyk.

“Announcing it publicly was the moment I realised it was real,” Okoyomoh says. “I had always said I didn’t want to build a company. But here I was, doing it anyway.”

Rubyk is a storytelling agency for African founders and business owners. In a market flooded with AI tools that can generate pitch decks, website copy, and investor materials in minutes, Okoyomoh and his co-founder, Andrew Kintum, are making what looks like an unusual bet: that the most important thing African startups need right now is not more speed, but more distinctiveness.

The translation gap
The idea behind Rubyk stems from something both founders had repeatedly observed, from different sides of the same table.

Okoyomoh saw it from the creative side. Founders who came to him with decks, briefs, and copy that were technically fine but fundamentally flat. “A lot of founders reach out to us with their first attempt at creating their deck” he says. “And honestly, it’s not bad. But it’s also not great. There’s a whole layer missing, and they end up sounding just like everyone else.”

Kintum saw it from the operational side. As a project manager working with early-stage startups, he watched founders build real products for real markets, only to struggle to articulate why any of it mattered. The pitch would fall short. The investor would pass. The product would stay invisible.

“Products can be copied. Prices can be undercut,” Kintum says. “But a story that is true and told well is almost impossible to replicate.”

They call it the translation gap: the distance between what a founder knows about their business and what they are able to communicate to the outside world. For African founders specifically, the gap is wider. The context is different. The markets are different. The stories are different. But when those stories pass through generic tools or templated frameworks, the specificity gets stripped out, and what remains could belong to any startup anywhere.

“AI does great at efficiency,” Okoyomoh says. “But African startups need distinctiveness. That’s what we provide.”

The Optometrist and the Project Manager
Victory and Andrew arrived at the same problem from opposite ends.

Victory holds a Doctor of Optometry degree, but communications pulled him in a different direction. Over six years, he built a career in brand storytelling and content strategy, most recently at Moniepoint, where he built editorial operations, produced Nigeria’s first report on the informal economy, and led campaigns that reached over a million impressions. Throughout that time, he kept seeing the same pattern: founders building meaningful products who could not get the world to understand what they were doing.

Andrew saw it from the other side. An Engineering graduate and a PMP-certified programme manager, he had spent years turning complex ideas into executable plans across Nigeria, Rwanda, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But even the most promising startups kept stalling at the same point. When he founded a community for early-stage founders, the problem became impossible to ignore.

“When was the last time a startup excited you?” he wrote in his launch post. “They had a great story, didn’t they? Stories move people. And we are not telling enough of them well.”

A deck that won a pitch
One of Rubyk’s early engagements illustrates the kind of problem they solve. A founder in the beauty industry was building a platform that would give African and African diaspora cosmetic companies access to manufacturing at a standard that matched global brands. It was significant work. For consumers who had been consistently overlooked by global makeup giants, it represented something real: the chance to feel seen, while maximising Africa’s natural resources.

The founder knew the idea was big. But translating that conviction into a story that would land with investors was a different challenge entirely. The significance was clear internally. Externally, it was not coming through.

Rubyk worked with the founder to translate the vision into a pitch deck built around the narrative, not just the numbers. The result: the founder used the deck to win a pitch and is now using it to raise further funding.

“We know there are a lot of other startups like this,” Okoyomoh says. “We want to build the framework that enables them to get seen, communicate with the world, and ensure that their story isn’t lost.”

Betting on the human layer
Rubyk’s positioning in the market is deliberate. In an era where AI can generate a first draft of almost anything, the agency does not position itself against AI. It positions itself as the layer that makes AI output actually work.

“A lot of founders come to us with content that’s 70 per cent there,” Okoyomoh says. “A half-finished deck, a ChatGPT brief, a messy doc. We take whatever they have and turn it into something that sounds like them and lands the way it should.”

The agency offers storytelling consultancy, pitch decks, investor materials, brand messaging, content marketing, visual identity, websites, financial modelling, and data storytelling. Every engagement is project-based, scoped to the client’s actual needs, and priced transparently.

Storytelling as a moat
When asked why storytelling, specifically, in a market that is moving faster toward automation, the two founders arrive at the same answer from different directions.

Okoyomoh points to LinkedIn. “I’m a LinkedIn hater,” he says, with a frankness that matches the brand voice he has built. “Not because it’s a bad platform, but because of what it enables. With AI, there’s a sameness that fills a space where people are meant to be their most authentic selves. “This isn’t necessarily an AI issue. It’s just the reality of what storytelling is. It requires a certain kind of authenticity that’s hard to find if you’re not sure what you’re looking for.”

Kintum frames it in market terms. “As AI commoditises execution, storytelling will become one of the biggest moats any company can build,” he says. “Soon, a hundred founders will ship the same product. The ones who will win are the ones who made people feel something.”

He points to TerraHaptix as an example. They build drones. But that is not their story. Their story is that they are pioneering the security infrastructure for Africa in an increasingly multipolar world. That framing changes everything: who invests, who partners, who believes.

“In a world of automated noise, the question is no longer ‘What did you build?’ but ‘Why should anyone care?'” Kintum says. “Rubyk exists to answer that question.”

“Rubyk exists because African stories are worth sharing and being understood,” Okoyomoh adds. “We want to make sure that the stories of African startups don’t get lost in translation. Simple as that.”

What comes next
Rubyk launched publicly in March 2026 and is actively working with clients across Nigeria and the African diaspora. The agency is building toward a proprietary storytelling methodology, an education layer that includes a free guide for African founders, and, longer term, a voice discovery product that would help founders articulate their natural communication style at scale.

For now, though, the focus is on the work. Telling one story at a time. Making sure each one lands.

“Your story matters,” Okoyomoh says. “We’re here to help you tell it right.”

With a Learn more link at rubyk.co., Rubyk remains a storytelling agency for African founders and business owners.