Every big tech company that mattered was really a bet on where technology was headed next.
Google bet on search. Amazon bet on infrastructure. ByteDance bet on the algorithm, then used that one strength to birth Douyin, TikTok, and a dozen other products that quietly run on the same core.
At Conduit, we're making a similar bet — just for a different world, and a different technology.
The bet: the next decade of business in Africa won't be won by better apps. It'll be won by autonomous agents that do the work businesses don't have the time, staff, or technical skill to do themselves.
The problem we keep running into
Talk to any small business owner in Nigeria — a fashion seller on Instagram, a service provider juggling WhatsApp orders, a consultant with no time to build a website — and you'll hear the same thing: they know what they need to do to grow, they just don't have the hands to do it.
Not because they're not capable. Because the tools built for "small business" were never really built for them. They were built for people with budgets, teams, and time none of them have.
We think that gap is closable — not with another dashboard to learn, but with agents that just do the work.
What we're actually building
Conduit isn't one product. It's the parent company behind a growing set of AI agents built to power African business workflows — the same way ByteDance is the parent behind products that share one underlying engine.
Two products sit under Conduit today:
- Aeon — a super agent for businesses, built to work the way a capable employee would: understand a task, execute it, follow up. Think of it as Claude Cowork, but built with small and mid-sized African businesses in mind first.
- Vi — the future of the website. Point it at a business's Instagram or social presence, and it builds a real, agent-ready site that manages what comes through it — leads, enquiries, orders — without a human babysitting every message.
Underneath both, Conduit builds the actual agent templates: reusable, deployable workflows — like turning an Instagram shop into a live storefront — that plug straight into Aeon.
Why this, why now
Every founder says "the timing is right." Here's ours: agent technology just became capable enough to do real, economically useful work — not chatbot small talk, actual task execution. And Africa's small business economy is enormous, underserved, and structurally excluded from most of the tools built for this wave.
That combination doesn't stay open forever. We intend to be early.
Where this goes
Long term, we don't see Conduit as a single app people download. We see it as a holding company — a growing constellation of AI agent products, each solving a specific African business problem, all sharing the same underlying agentic backbone.
That's a bigger, slower, harder thing to build than a single app. We're building it anyway.
This blog is where we'll think out loud about that build — the products, the decisions, the failures, and the wins. If you're building a business and tired of doing everything yourself, you're exactly who we're building for.
Welcome to Conduit.