Over 52,000 businesses use its digital platform

Afobata has said more than 52,000 businesses across over 3,000 industries are actively using its digital platform as the technology company marks its seventh anniversary.

This was contained in a statement sighted by Vanguard, which said the company had developed a multi-tenant platform aimed at helping small and medium-sized businesses access digital tools without the cost of building such systems from scratch.

According to the statement, Afobata was founded in 2019 as an e-commerce and software development company, initially building websites and other digital solutions for individual clients.

The company’s Chief Executive Officer, Virginus Alajekwu, said the firm later changed its approach after repeatedly developing similar features for different clients.

He said Afobata began pre-building digital tools that businesses could customise to their individual needs, leading to the development of a shared platform where independent businesses can operate with separate data and branding.

The statement said the platform is currently used by businesses including online stores, cryptocurrency exchanges, utility bill payment services, flight booking systems, e-learning platforms, hospitals and logistics operators.

It added that Afobata’s tools include booking systems, payment processing, client dashboards, workflow automation and analytics.

Alajekwu said the company’s objective was to make digital technology more accessible to African businesses.

“Technology should simplify growth, not complicate it,” he said.

“We have spent years building the infrastructure so that African entrepreneurs can simply plug in and run, competing with far bigger, better-funded companies on the same sophisticated tooling.”

The company said its growth had been driven largely by word-of-mouth referrals among small and medium-sized businesses, without external funding or large marketing budgets.

The statement noted that Nigeria has about 39.6 million micro, small and medium enterprises, according to the 2021 survey by the National Bureau of Statistics and the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency.

It said Afobata plans to expand its services into fintech, agritech, renewable energy and digital healthcare, while also seeking to expand beyond African markets.

The company has set a target of serving more than one million businesses before its 10th anniversary.

“We planned for this scale and achieved it before, and we will do so again within the next three years,” Alajekwu said.