Yazi, a South African AI-native research platform built on WhatsApp, has closed its first undisclosed institutional funding round, giving the startup a pre-money valuation of R30 million ($1.6 million).
The round was led by 3 Capital Ventures (3CV), the South African early-stage venture firm spun out of Allan Gray, an investment management firm.
The investment will fund product development, including the launch of automated voice interviews via WhatsApp, expand Yazi’s research participant panel across Africa, and support international scaling as demand from UK and European research agencies grows.
“The US and UK aren’t markets we’re entering in the traditional sense, they’re finding us,” said Timothy Treagus, the company’s chief executive officer. “We rank number one on Google for WhatsApp research keywords globally, and over 80% of our inbound leads now come through AI search, people asking ChatGPT and Gemini for WhatsApp research tools and landing on us.”
In South Africa, around 28 to 29 million people use WhatsApp, while in the United Kingdom, the number is about 41 to42 million. Across Europe, adoption is extremely high: in Spain, roughly 33 million people use it, and in Germany, the figure is over 50 million.
WhatsApp is already embedded in daily life across the globe; this funding gives Yazi the runway to scale from a cross-global research infrastructure without needing to rebuild user behaviour from scratch.
Founded in 2022 by Mzwandile Sotsaka, chief technology officer and Timothy Treagus, chief executive officer, Yazi operates in over 15 countries. Yazi enables organisations to run AI-moderated interviews, surveys, diary studies, and panel research directly through WhatsApp, the messaging app used by 3.2 billion people globally.
“We built Yazi because the research industry was ignoring the biggest communication platform on the planet,” said Treagus. “Traditional research tools that rely on app downloads, email addresses, and broadband just don’t work here. We’ve built the infrastructure to fix that.”
Yazi’s platform uses AI to conduct natural conversations with participants, probing deeper and following up in real time, replicating the work of skilled researchers but at a massive scale. Multi-day diary studies can be deployed and analysed automatically, with transcripts, themes, and presentation-ready insights generated by the system.
With access to 1.8 million pre-qualified participants across demographics and geographies, Yazi said it delivers fast answers to questions ranging from product feedback to policy research, all through a channel people already trust.
“We meet people where they already are,” said Sotsaka. “That’s why our response rates are fundamentally higher than traditional research, and why we’re reaching populations the industry has historically failed to access.”
Yazi says its revenue grew 2.5x over the past financial year, with 64% month-on-month growth in its most recent quarter. The company counts Old Mutual, Pick n Pay, Discovery, Capitec, and Ipsos among its South African clients, alongside a growing portfolio in the UK, Europe, and the US.
More than 65% of revenue is now foreign-denominated, signalling strong international traction. Ipsos recently signed a 12-month tracker contract, while Old Mutual is launching a quarterly research tracker.
