By Abundance Onubogu
For over a decade, Joshua Ajayi helped keep Nigeria’s mobile networks running. These days, from a quiet corner of Nottingham, he is building something different, software that helps the businesses he grew up around finally get a handle on their finances.
Joshua Ajayi is not the kind of person who makes a lot of noise about what he is building.
He shows up to his day job at a UK technology company every morning, writes code for a production platform that processes thousands of live delivery and route events across agricultural depots, and then goes home and writes more code. Different kind of code this time, and for a different kind of problem. One that has been sitting in the back of his mind long before he ever moved to England.
“I grew up watching businesses in Nigeria operate on paper and prayer,” he says, laughing slightly at his own phrasing. “Not because they did not care about doing things properly. Because nobody had built anything affordable enough, or practical enough, for the way they actually work.”
That observation, and a phone call with an old friend who had spent a decade as an accountant watching the same thing from the inside, eventually became ZetaFisc.
The long road that led here
Ajayi did not start as a software engineer. He spent the better part of a decade as a telecoms engineer in Nigeria, working across the country’s biggest networks. At Globacom, he operated 2G and 3G base stations across Rivers State. At Etisalat Nigeria, now 9mobile, he managed field operations across the access and transmission network. At Cobranet in Lagos, he led a small team of technicians and riggers responsible for maintaining 99.9% network availability for corporate clients. At Merit Telecoms, he designed in-building coverage systems for large commercial environments.
It was demanding, unglamorous work. The kind of work where things break at midnight, and you fix them before morning. But he was also always coding on the side. Android apps, internal tools, a quiz game he published on the Play Store, and a Flutter application for another project entirely. The software world was pulling at him in a way the telecoms world no longer was.
In 2022, he made a decision that surprised some of the people around him. He moved to Nottingham, enrolled in an MSc in Cybernetics and Communications Engineering at Nottingham Trent University, and started rebuilding his career from a different angle.
“People thought I was being reckless,” he says. “A stable job, decent income, and I was going back to study. But I knew what I wanted to build and I knew I needed to do it properly.”
Learning what reliability really means
After completing his MSc, Ajayi joined Total Integrated Solutions Ltd in Mansfield, England, a company that builds monitoring technology for fire safety and healthcare environments. It was not a glamorous entry into UK software engineering. But it taught him something that has shaped everything he has built since.
He worked on a fire alarm monitoring application used to remotely watch live fire panel data across connected buildings. He maintained the backend server that received and processed real-time alarm events. He worked on a Windows Service sitting between the fire panels and the monitoring platform, handling both serial and TCP/IP communications. He also worked on IoT integrations with Vayyar Care fall-detection devices, hardware used in care homes to detect whether someone had fallen and needed help.
“When the software you are writing is responsible for whether someone gets the help they need, you stop being casual about edge cases,” he says. “That experience changed how I approach every system I build now. Including ZetaFisc.”
He later moved to a software engineering role at a UK agricultural technology company, where he works on a real-time vehicle routing and fleet integration platform. The platform ingests live telematics data, drives a third-party route-solving engine, and processes thousands of delivery events daily across multiple depots. He built a live data pipeline from scratch, resolved a long-standing duplicate-record bug that had been silently affecting the platform, built webhook handlers for live delivery events, and tightened the system’s error monitoring across nearly twenty API call sites.
By most measures, that is already a full career. But for Ajayi, it has always been the day job.
The other problem
The friend who changed everything is Fawekun Adeola Sunday. He is an accountant and business consultant based in Nigeria with over ten years of experience sitting across the table from business owners and watching them try to manage their finances on paper, Excel, and WhatsApp.
He had seen a pattern so consistent it had started to feel inevitable. Business owners who genuinely wanted to run their companies properly but had no practical tools to do it. Big accounting software like Sage and QuickBooks existed, but was priced out of reach for many Nigerian businesses and was not built around Nigerian statutory requirements. Local tools existed but remained limited and unreliable. This led the two friends to create ZetaFisc, a cloud-based accounting and business management platform.
“My clients were never the problem,” Adeola says. “Nigerian businesses want to comply. They are willing and ready. The issue is that the tools available to them were built somewhere else, for someone else. They do not reflect how Nigerian businesses actually operate, so compliance becomes this complicated, frustrating thing instead of just part of running the business. What ZetaFisc does is embed compliance into the everyday workflow, so it stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling like just how things work.”
When he and Ajayi started talking seriously about what they could build together, it did not take long to agree on the shape of the problem. What the market needed was not another accounting tool dressed up for a Nigerian audience. It needed something designed from the ground up for the way Nigerian businesses actually operate, with NRS compliance built in, Nigerian payment gateways integrated natively, payroll that understands PAYE, pension, NHF, NHIS, ITF and NSITF out of the box, and a price point that works for businesses of all sizes.
The third co-founder who completed the team is Miriam Ajayi, a Quality Assurance Engineer based in the UK with over three years of experience in manual and automated testing. Miriam has led QA teams on fintech and cryptocurrency platforms, with hands-on experience ensuring KYC, AML, and GDPR compliance standards are met across software products. Her background means ZetaFisc is not just built to work; it is built to be tested properly, which in a financial compliance platform is not a minor detail.
Together, the three incorporated Zetacoms Technology Limited in the United Kingdom, with a corresponding business registration in Nigeria under Zetacoms Limited, reflecting the company’s dual-market roots and its commitment to building technology that serves Nigerian businesses from within the Nigerian regulatory environment.
What they actually built
ZetaFisc is a cloud-based accounting, invoicing, and financial compliance platform built for Nigerian businesses of all sizes. It handles the full financial operations of a business, covering professional invoicing, payment vouchers with automatic VAT and WHT calculations, payroll processing with full Nigerian statutory deductions, bank reconciliation, multi-level approval workflows with digital signatures, vendor and customer management, and a complete audit trail of every financial action on the platform.
One of the platform’s most practical features is its proactive tax reminder system. Rather than leaving businesses to calculate what they owe, ZetaFisc automatically computes the exact tax amount due based on the business’s transaction history and sends reminders ahead of the deadline. For many Nigerian business owners, that level of clarity has never been available to them before.
The architecture underneath it is not simple. Ajayi built it as a multi-tenant system where each business gets its own completely isolated workspace within a shared database, segregated carefully by tenant so that no company’s data ever touches another’s. The platform is hosted on Nigerian infrastructure to support data residency, sovereignty, and alignment with Nigeria’s data protection expectations under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023. Automated backup and restore systems run daily. A real-time health monitoring dashboard tracks CPU, memory, and per-tenant database usage across both the production and staging environments.
Two Nigerian payment gateways, Flutterwave and Monnify, are integrated natively. The Android companion app is live on Google Play. The web platform is at zetafisc.ng.
The timing is not accidental. The NRS e-invoicing mandate is being rolled out in phases: medium businesses go live from July 2026 with enforcement from January 2027, while smaller businesses follow from July 2027. ZetaFisc was built for exactly that gap: the businesses that are about to discover they need to comply and have no idea where to start.
Today ZetaFisc has 29 active business tenants, has processed 187 invoices and 245 payment vouchers, and has paying customers across sectors, including travel, media, automotive, and professional services.
The other product
If ZetaFisc came from watching Nigerian businesses struggle with compliance, ZetaFlow came from Ajayi’s own daily frustration with productivity tools.
“I would come into work and open four different applications before I could even understand what I was supposed to be doing that day,” he says. “Tasks in one place, meetings in another, project tracking somewhere else. The switching itself was costing time that nobody was accounting for.”
ZetaFlow is his attempt to solve that. It is a unified productivity and meeting intelligence platform, live at zetaflow.co.uk, that brings tasks, meetings, sprint planning, project management, notes, reminders, and team communication into a single multi-tenant workspace.
The hard part was not the productivity features. It was the meetings. Ajayi built a meeting recording and transcription system from scratch using Agora WebRTC for cloud recording, Whisper AI for transcription, Redis Bull queues to manage processing load without saturating the server, and audio chunking that processes recordings in eight-minute segments so transcription begins before the meeting is even over. The platform generates AI-powered summaries and action points automatically once a meeting ends.
Getting there was not clean. A server that collapsed under transcription load. Audio chunks that would not reconstruct in sequence. SSL certificates are conflicting with the nginx configuration at eleven at night. Each problem was solved and replaced by the next one.
The platform is already being used by the Zetacoms team internally. Every interview the team conducts happens inside ZetaFlow.
What it all adds up to
It would be easy to tell Ajayi’s story as a hustle narrative, the guy working two jobs, coding until midnight, building products in the gaps. But that framing misses something important about what he has actually done.
He has taken the discipline of someone who learned software reliability while maintaining fire safety systems, the architectural depth of someone building enterprise-grade logistics platforms at production scale, and the cultural knowledge of someone who grew up in the market he is building for. He has put all of it in the service of a real problem that affects millions of businesses.
He is not building ZetaFisc because it is a good business opportunity, though he believes it is. He is building it because when Nigerian businesses cannot manage their finances properly, the consequences are real. Penalties. Shutdowns. Businesses that cannot grow because they cannot demonstrate their financial records.
“The compliance deadline is here,” he says. “These businesses need something that works. That is the whole point.”
