Oda
Founder · 2025 – present
A WhatsApp-first AI marketplace connecting Nigerian buyers with verified local vendors. No apps, no websites, just chat.
The Problem
In Nigeria, small businesses lack e-commerce infrastructure and technical skills. Buyers face scams, endless scrolling, and opaque pricing on existing platforms. Most vendors can't build websites or manage complex dashboards. Oda solves this by making WhatsApp the entire interface: vendors register and list products through structured chat flows, buyers discover them through natural language search, and an AI assistant orchestrates discovery, matching, and safe connections.
Inspiration
Built from first-hand experience with the friction of buying and selling in Nigeria, where trust is scarce, discovery is word-of-mouth, and most small business owners run entirely on WhatsApp. The insight was simple: don't build another app nobody will download; build where people already are. WhatsApp has over 100M users in Nigeria. Oda turns it into a marketplace.