When Tolu Adesina left his role as Product Director at Moniepoint, one of Nigeria’s most influential fintech companies, he wasn’t exiting the ecosystem, he was doubling down on it. His new venture, Zirro, is a digital operations suite designed to help Nigerian businesses ditch fragmented, dollar-priced tools for a unified, locally priced alternative built in Naira.
For Adesina, Zirro isn’t a pivot. It’s the conclusion of a decade-long observation: African businesses are running 21st-century companies with software designed for foreign markets.
Zirro offers a single, Naira-priced digital suite that handles sales, inventory, payments, customers, logistics, and operations. But behind the product is a bigger premise: Africa’s SMEs aren’t struggling because they lack ambition. They’re struggling because the tools available weren’t built for their realities.
A decade of building inside the problem
Adesina’s path into this moment wasn’t accidental. It was shaped by institutions, accelerators, and startups that reflect different sides of African commerce.
He began as a data analyst at Stanbic IBTC, became a founder with what eventually evolved into Rewrite Agency, and shipped products for companies like Access Bank and DotBank. At Decagon, he led development on more than 40 applications for global companies including Indeed, Nestlé, and Vertex. By the time he joined Moniepoint, the pattern had already surfaced.
“The more I built, the clearer it became. The problem wasn’t capability. It was context. We’re using tools designed for environments we don’t operate in,” he says.
While scaling Moniepoint’s business-facing products and revenue lines, he encountered the day-to-day infrastructure of Nigerian SMEs: paper invoices and WhatsApp chats substituting for CRMs, spreadsheets that double as inventory systems, retail shops managing stock by memory, and subscription fees paid in dollars that quietly erode margins.
The systems weren’t broken. They were improvised.
The market gap: Software that assumes Lagos is London
Zirro enters a problem space that has been growing for years: global software built on assumptions that don’t hold in Africa. Tools assume stable power, consistent internet, western workflow discipline, and price points that don’t fluctuate with exchange rates. Nigerian businesses operate in the opposite direction.
Zirro’s response is built on three conditions:
- Local pricing in Naira, not dollars.
- Local behavior, not imported workflows.
- Local infrastructure that works even when the environment doesn’t.
It isn’t promising digital transformation in abstract terms. It’s trying to create a foundation Nigerian businesses can stand on.
Early evidence: Impact before scale
Early adopters offer a preview of what Zirro could unlock.
OaksGifts & Surprises, a growing retail business, switched from a dollar-priced POS system to Zirro and describes the move as more than a cost decision, it was about alignment.
“It feels like the first tool that understands where we’re starting from,” the founder says.
A fashion entrepreneur, Ayinke, who previously managed operations through notebooks and ad-hoc spreadsheets, uses even simpler language:
“For the first time, I can see my business.”
Their reactions are less about features and more about architecture, about finally having a window into how the business is actually functioning.
The proposition: An operating system, not another app
Zirro isn’t chasing the SaaS trendline. It’s chasing infrastructural relevance. If it works, Nigerian retailers, fashion brands, distributors, and service businesses will gain something they’ve never fully had: a system to grow inside.
The ambition is clear:
Start in Nigeria, the hardest market to crack, and expand to other ecosystems with similar realities. Not by exporting a product, but by exporting a model.
“If we fix this here,” Adesina says, “we aren’t just building a business. We’re building a blueprint.”
What comes next
Zirro is currently onboarding early users, and its next phase will test whether the thesis holds when demand compounds: Can one platform become the shared backbone for Nigerian SMEs? Can Naira-priced tooling compete with dollar-based incumbents? And can a locally built product scale without inheriting the same limitations that defined its predecessors?
African tech has long been shaped by imported systems, borrowed tech, borrowed pricing, borrowed frameworks. Zirro is betting that the next phase won’t be borrowed at all.
If the bet lands, the shift won’t just be digital. It will be structural.
