7 African startups powering sales, sports, support, and settlements

Startups On Our Radar highlights innovative African startups tackling continent-specific challenges. In our last issue, we showcased seven trailblazing ventures advancing sustainability, AI, healthcare, and marketing. Look out for our upcoming edition on November 14, 2025.

This week, we spotlight seven Nigerian startups revolutionizing sales management, sports analytics, event coordination, and the creative economy. Here’s why these companies deserve your attention:

Laddar: Africa’s Comprehensive Sales Management Platform (SaaS, Nigeria)

Established in 2022, Laddar addresses the complexities of managing sales teams and agents across diverse African industries and business sizes. The platform offers dual interfaces tailored for managers and agents, enabling seamless oversight of sales operations, performance tracking, customer data collection, and transaction processing both online and offline.

Users can design and execute campaigns encompassing product inventory, shipping logistics, agent segmentation, supervisory controls, and incentive schemes payable via cash, airtime, or data. Attendance policies and detailed reporting dashboards further enhance campaign management. Laddar integrates robust KYC verification, including BVN, NIN, and geo-tagged selfie authentication, ensuring secure agent onboarding. Its API connectivity allows smooth integration with existing enterprise systems.

Sales agents benefit from multiple selling channels such as in-person transactions, shareable links, QR codes, and referral networks. The platform’s embedded finance feature facilitates cash payments by debiting agents’ wallets, mitigating fraud risks. Offline functionality ensures uninterrupted operations in low-connectivity areas.

Laddar’s revenue model is primarily license-based, charging businesses per agent seat. Additional income streams include recruitment fees for sourcing sales agents and charges for value-added services like SMS, email campaigns, and airtime/data rewards.

Why Laddar stands out: By consolidating onboarding, verification, payments, inventory, training, and analytics into a single platform with offline capabilities, Laddar effectively addresses the realities of African field sales. Its agent wallet debit system significantly reduces fraud exposure. Currently, over 25,000 sales agents across nearly 100 companies in sectors such as banking, insurance, entertainment, FMCG, and e-commerce use Laddar. The startup aims to expand its agent network to 100,000 across Africa, positioning itself as the backbone for scaling distributed sales teams.

Teeketing: API-Driven Event Management for Seamless Experiences (Events, Nigeria)

Launched in May 2025 by Madukaife Linus, Teeketing is an API-first event management platform designed to unify event planning, hosting, and analytics within a single ecosystem. It solves the common challenge of juggling disparate tools for payments, reminders, feedback, and certification.

Event organizers can list events publicly or privately, automate reminders, and send real-time updates about venue or schedule changes. The platform supports issuing attendance certificates and collecting feedback from attendees and no-shows, converting insights into star ratings. Event pages can showcase promotional flyers and videos to boost engagement.

Teeketing monetizes through a commission of up to 10% on paid ticket sales, while free events negotiate listing terms directly. Additional revenue comes from premium consulting for large-scale events, paid advertising, certificate issuance fees, and plans to introduce a token-based system for platform features.

Why Teeketing is noteworthy: Its API-first approach allows event organizers to embed ticketing directly on their websites, retaining audience engagement without redirecting users externally-a key advantage over competitors like Tix Africa. Upcoming features include a marketplace for verified event vendors such as photographers and caterers, rated by past performance, and a buy-now-pay-later option for ticket buyers. To date, Teeketing has issued over 20,000 tickets and processed approximately ₦1.4 million ($9,732) in sales.

Martha AI: Delivering Empathetic, African-Centric Customer Support (AI, Nigeria)

Founded by Moore Dagogo Hart, also the creator of Zap, Martha AI is an intelligent support agent designed to automate customer service with a distinctly African touch. The concept emerged from Hart’s experience managing overwhelming support demands at Zap, especially during off-hours, and the lack of truly localized automation tools.

Businesses integrate Martha AI into their websites or apps via APIs or plug-and-play widgets. Built on GPT-5, the platform incorporates a proprietary empathy engine analyzing sentiment, emotion, and context to deliver nuanced responses. It supports African languages including Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo, and Pidgin, facilitating culturally relevant interactions.

The system features a dashboard and escalation protocol, alerting human agents when issues exceed the bot’s capacity, who can then intervene or update the AI with accurate information.

Why Martha AI matters: Unlike global players like Zendesk, Martha AI is tailored to African users’ linguistic and cultural nuances, addressing frustrations with generic support systems. It’s already making an impact, assisting Black Pride Canada’s mental health call center by supporting over 70 individuals in crisis. A full launch is planned for Q1 2026, with integrations for WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram, and AI voice capabilities to automate call centers.

ZitraPay: Simplifying Cross-Border Invoice Payments for African Businesses (Fintech, Nigeria)

Founded in 2025, ZitraPay addresses the delays and FX access challenges African importers face when relying on traditional banks for international payments. The platform offers global invoice settlement and liquidity management services, enabling businesses to move funds efficiently between local and offshore entities.

Operating since June 2025, ZitraPay partners with licensed liquidity providers to source foreign currency and leverages region-specific banking rails to expedite supplier payments, typically settling within 24 to 48 hours. The platform emphasizes rigorous compliance, including thorough client profiling, owner verification via BVN/NIN, and sanction list checks.

Clients submit invoices, after which ZitraPay sources FX and executes payments through its network of banks and payment partners across the US, Canada, UK, India, and China. Despite a soft launch, the startup has processed over $1 million in transactions.

Why ZitraPay is a game-changer: With Africa’s cross-border payments market projected to hit $1 trillion by 2035, ZitraPay’s meticulous approach to compliance and payment execution sets it apart. Nigeria’s recent removal from the FATF grey list is expected to enhance transaction speeds and banking access, positioning ZitraPay for accelerated growth.

Bubblegum Health: Discreet, Woman-Centered Reproductive Care (Healthtech, Nigeria)

Founded by Isaac Odugbesan, Bubblegum Health offers a confidential platform for women’s reproductive health, addressing stigma and privacy concerns that often deter women from seeking care. Research revealed discomfort with male doctors and fragmented medical records as key barriers.

The platform provides telehealth consultations with female general practitioners, allowing users to keep cameras off for privacy. It maintains secure personal health profiles, enabling women to control their medical histories. An integrated e-commerce shop offers over-the-counter products via pharmacy partnerships, while a referral system connects users to specialized clinics.

Bubblegum Health also supports sexual assault survivors through a dedicated reporting process that alerts the Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Agency and offers free post-trauma care, including access to emergency rape kits.

Why Bubblegum Health is impactful: By fostering a female-led, stigma-free environment with privacy-focused features, Bubblegum Health builds trust and encourages repeat engagement. Future plans include an African-cultured period tracker and an AI chatbot trained on consultation data to provide predictive health guidance and escalate complex cases to human experts.

Trackus: Empowering Youth Football with Data-Driven Insights (SportsTech, Nigeria)

Trackus is a sports analytics platform designed to help youth soccer teams enhance training and talent development through data. Founder Elisha Odemakinde identified that many teams lack objective feedback, relying on intuition rather than analytics.

Coaches or players upload match videos, which the AI analyzes to provide detailed metrics on speed, dribbling, passing, tackling, team dynamics, and scoring chances. The system can also assess player readiness for scouting, appealing to clubs and talent scouts.

Trackus offers subscription and pay-per-use pricing, charging approximately $4 per player per video for clubs and $5 for individuals. It has processed over 143 hours of footage and serves around 50 teams with 400+ players across Africa.

Why Trackus is promising: With nearly 500 football teams in Nigeria, performance analysis is often informal. Trackus aims to democratize access to advanced analytics, competing with pricier solutions like Track160 by focusing on affordability. Its unique forecast-based AI not only reports past performance but simulates optimal game outcomes, guiding teams on how to improve. While capable of analyzing other sports, Trackus prioritizes soccer, where it has secured paying enterprise clients.

Crevoe: Building Africa’s Unified Platform for Creators (Creator Economy, Nigeria)

Founded by Linda Obi, Crevoe is a comprehensive platform designed to unify Africa’s fragmented creator economy. It enables creators to produce content, host live sessions, sell courses, manage communities, and receive payments-all within one ecosystem.

The platform features an Explore feed akin to TikTok, a Studio for course and mentorship creation, and a Marketplace for content consumption and purchases. It includes built-in video conferencing and supports ticket sales for paid communities.

To address payout delays common on global platforms, Crevoe offers a five-day payout cycle. Having recently exited beta, it has onboarded over 150 creators and plans to raise a seed round within six months. Revenue streams include transaction fees, marketplace commissions, and enterprise tools for creators.

Why Crevoe is a key player: Africa’s creator economy is valued at over $5 billion, with Nigeria contributing more than $31 million. However, monetization remains fragmented, and infrastructure often fails to meet local bandwidth and payout needs. Crevoe’s mobile-first design and localized servers optimize performance for African users, offering an integrated solution tailored to the continent’s unique challenges.