Financial tools for Africa's informal merchants.
Millions of Nigerian micro-merchants run their businesses from notebooks and memory. Tailors, food vendors, mechanics, dispatch riders, market traders. Credit sales go unrecorded. Debts get forgotten. Without records, they can't get fair financing.
The ledger is the data layer. Financing is the business.
I spent three years on Lightspeed's Capital team building merchant cash advance infrastructure in North America, and years at Interswitch building systems for Nigerian banks. Zalyx is that same infrastructure, rebuilt for merchants who have never had a credit file.
It works offline and syncs when the signal comes back. Payment records can't be edited after the fact, so the data holds up when it matters for financing. New merchant types, from mechanics to dispatch riders, launch in weeks, not quarters.
