IROKO’s Music-Streaming Arm Was Struck Off in March 2018 Owing Roughly $2m. Its UK Parent, Backed by Tiger Global and Canal+, Has Not Filed Accounts Since 2019

IROKING Limited, the company that ran Jason Njoku’s music-streaming and artist-payout service for Nigerian musicians, was struck off the UK register on 27 March 2018. Companies House records it as dissolved by compulsory strike-off, with the first Gazette notice filed 9 January 2018. Njoku himself has put a number on what it cost: “All in, Iroko lost ~$2m on our little experiment in the music sector.” No masters, publishing catalogues or artist contracts changed hands when the money that kept IROKING running was raised. What this desk can verify is who put capital into IROKING’s parent company, when, and what the UK corporate record shows that parent is doing today, which is very little.

IROKING Limited (company number 07856960) was incorporated 22 November 2011 with Njoku and co-founder Bastian Gotter as directors from day one. Companies House lists its business as video distribution activities. Its parent, now called IROKO Limited (company number 07186627) and known as IROKO Partners Ltd from its own incorporation in March 2010 until March 2018, is the UK-registered holding company behind the Nollywood streaming platform iROKOtv. On 25 January 2016, a trade report stated that IROKO had raised “$19m in content development and in capital funding, through multiple deals,” naming “French media giant CANAL+, together with existing investor Kinnevik AB” as the sources, with the money earmarked for local content financing, production, and product and engineering teams in Lagos and New York. Companies House independently confirms part of that story: Jacques du Puy, identified in the report as president of Canal+ Overseas, was appointed a director of IROKO Limited on 19 January 2016, six days before the announcement. He resigned in July 2021.

What the registry shows about who controlled the company

Canal+ and Kinnevik do not appear by name on IROKO Limited’s Companies House record. What does appear is a person with significant control entry for Charles Payson Coleman III, founder of the US investment firm Tiger Global Management, notified 6 April 2016 and holding more than 25 per cent but not more than 50 per cent of shares and voting rights. That notification date is when the UK’s PSC disclosure regime came into force for existing controllers, not necessarily when Tiger Global first put money into IROKO, and this desk has not found a primary source that dates the original investment. Henrik Persson, later identified publicly as Kinnevik’s head of investments, had already served as an IROKO Limited director from June 2012 to September 2014, which is the clearest documentary link between Kinnevik and the company, predating the 2016 Canal+ round by roughly a year and a half.

The ownership picture changed sharply on 12 May 2022. Companies House filings from that date show Coleman’s PSC entry ceasing, Njoku being notified as the sole person with significant control at more than 50 per cent but less than 75 per cent of shares and voting rights, and directors Bastian Gotter and Nazar Yasin both terminated. Njoku has been the company’s only listed director since. Nothing in the public filing history explains why Tiger Global’s stake ended or what Njoku paid, if anything, to consolidate control; “not disclosed” is the accurate description of that transaction’s terms, not an estimate.

A dissolution the founder described two different ways within two years

Njoku’s own public statements about IROKING do not agree with each other. In April 2017, writing publicly, he rejected the idea that the business was finished: “IROKING is not dead. It is still very much alive. Revenues are my metric of business success and iROKING has recurring scalable revenue.” He dated the product to May 2011 and said it had “easily paid out over $1m in minimum guarantees and revenue share to musicians” over the preceding two years. Less than a year later, the company behind that product was in the UK strike-off process that ended in its dissolution. By April 2019, Njoku was describing IROKING in the past tense: it “officially died as a corporate entity over a year ago 27/03/2018,” having generated just $212,900 in gross music revenue in its final full year, 80 per cent of which went back to artists under IROKO’s standard 20 per cent commission, with the largest outlays being guaranteed revenue-share agreements with musicians and $90,000 sponsoring tours. Both statements came from the same person describing the same company. This desk is reporting the contradiction rather than resolving it, because no source explains what changed between April 2017’s “still very much alive” and the strike-off process that began roughly nine months later.

The parent company’s current filings

IROKO Limited itself is not dissolved, but its Companies House record shows a company that has stopped keeping up with basic filing obligations. The most recent accounts on file cover the year ended 31 December 2019, filed 16 July 2021; nothing has been filed for 2020 onward. The most recent confirmation statement is dated 11 March 2023. On 27 February 2024, Companies House issued a first Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off, the same mechanism that dissolved IROKING six years earlier. That action was suspended on 16 March 2024, and nothing has been filed since, a gap of more than two and a half years as of this writing. Despite the lapsed filings, the company’s status field currently reads “Active, active proposal to strike off,” a label this desk is reporting exactly as the register displays it rather than translating into a firmer claim either way. Readers checking the record after publication may find a different status; strike-off suspensions can be revisited or lapse without further public notice beyond the next Gazette entry.

What this means for artists

Directly, very little for anyone currently signed to or streaming through IROKO’s surviving businesses: IROKING, the entity that paid musicians minimum guarantees and revenue share, has been gone since 2018, and no masters or publishing rights are implicated in either the 2016 capital raise or the 2022 ownership change. Indirectly, the record is a useful case study in how thin the public evidence trail can be for African music capital even when the jurisdiction is the United Kingdom, a country with one of the more transparent corporate registries in the world. A reported “$19m” headline figure from 2016 turns out, on the only primary record this desk could locate, to be a multi-deal total with no single confirmed price; an investor’s exact entry date is obscured by a 2016 disclosure-law deadline rather than a deal date; and a company that once distributed guaranteed payments to Nigerian musicians can sit for years in a filings-lapsed, strike-off-suspended limbo without any public document explaining why. Artists and executives relying on headline funding numbers to judge a platform’s stability should know that the number reported at announcement and the number a registry can actually confirm are frequently not the same figure.

What remains unestablished: the exact split of the reported $19m between Canal+ and Kinnevik, or whether that figure was ever confirmed in a primary Canal+ or Vivendi document rather than trade reporting; the date Tiger Global’s investment was actually made, as distinct from the 2016 date it was first disclosed on the PSC register; what, if anything, changed between Njoku’s April 2017 “still very much alive” statement and the strike-off process that began within the year; and what IROKO Limited’s current operational status is, given no accounts filed since 2019 and a strike-off notice suspended rather than resolved. This desk checked for all four and found none of them documented.