Teju Ajani, CEO Apple, Nigeria

Teju Ajani is the Managing Director (Nigeria) for Apple Inc. She is the company’s first African top-executive employee for its first office on the continent, and the first woman in that role. She is a Nigerian technology expert with work experience at BEA Systems, VMware, Oracle, and Google and is recognized as one of the most influential women by various organizations, a frequently featured speaker across technology and media circles.

Education and career

Ajani acquired a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Economics from the University of Ilorin in Kwara state, North Central Nigeria, and a Master of Science in Science Engineering (MSSE) from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. She also has various certificates in Startup Management from Stanford University and Practical Product Management from Pragmatic Marketing respectively.

Ajani started her career as a software engineer in 2000 at Vovida network in California which was subsequently bought out by Cisco. In 2001 she joined BEA Systems as a Developer Relations Engineer and became a systems engineer in 2004 From 2007 to 2011 she worked as a senior customer programs manager at VMware. In 2011, she worked as a principal product manager at Oracle before joining Google in 2012 as its business development manager in Nigeria. In 2014, she joined YouTube as its head of content partnerships for Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018 she worked as a country manager for Android partnerships for Google. She was appointed managing director of Apple in Nigeria in 2021.