In 2020, Babatola Awe, then a consultant for Deloitte, was paying for Zoom, Microsoft 365, and a growing list of international software tools, all priced in dollars. Every invoice was a reminder for Awe: African businesses were paying Western companies to do African work.
When COVID-19 hit in March that year, work broke. Documents were trapped in locked offices. Approvals depended on physical signatures. Emails became databases. WhatsApp groups became project management systems.
For Awe and his co-founder, Akintayo Okekunle, the dysfunction was expensive.
“We asked ourselves, How long will Africa depend on the West to enable business productivity?” Awe recalls.
By 2021, they had an answer: not much longer. The two quit their corporate jobs and launched Flowmono, an AI-driven platform combining e-signatures, workflow automation, and document management, built specifically for African businesses.
Day 1: The ₦720,000 problem
The spark came from a client project. Someone asked them to build a contract management platform. While working on it, a question emerged: How do people actually sign contracts digitally?
The answer was clear.
DocuSign charged ₦720,000 ($480) annually. Adobe Sign charged ₦431,820 ($288). For Nigerian businesses, those prices were prohibitive.
“Their solutions are expensive and not tailored for Africa,” Awe says. “That’s when we decided to build something for Africa, by Africans, and for the world.”
Flowmono launched at ₦204,000 ($140) yearly, more than 70% cheaper than DocuSign, more than 50% cheaper than Adobe Sign.
But cheaper wasn’t enough. It had to work at an enterprise-grade level.
The team made a critical decision: build everything from scratch. No white-labeling. No licencing third-party code. Every line of code written in-house using Angular, .NET, C#, JavaScript, and TypeScript.
“We built everything ourselves; our platform is 100% our intellectual property,” Awe says. “Every tool, every module, every line of code is designed for Africa, but benchmarked to global standards.”
Day 500: The customers who forced them to level up
Flowmono’s early customers weren’t startups testing a cheap alternative. They were enterprises with real security requirements and zero tolerance for failure: Stanbic IBTC, UAC, CardinalStone, and Coronation Bank.
Banks demanded audit trails. Financial services firms needed encryption meeting international standards. Corporates wanted seamless integrations.
While the features worked from the start, the user experience told a different story.
“It was the UX that customers didn’t find seamless,” Awe admits. “This forced us to revamp our whole product interface in the middle of 2025.”
The overhaul was comprehensive, including navigation, customisation, and the entire visual design.
“Half of the features that exist on Flowmono today came directly from customer requests, especially enterprise customers,” Awe says.
Every enterprise demanded more. And every demand made Flowmono stronger.
Landing Stanbic IBTC as a customer required intelligence, preparation, and patience.
“We got into the room through networking,” Awe explains. “But we also knew they were using Adobe Sign, and we knew their use cases already.”
The Flowmono team had done their homework. They understood Stanbic’s workflows and where Adobe was falling short.
“We saved Stanbic more than 70% of the cost compared to what they were spending on Adobe.”
But knowing the value and closing the deal were different things.
What followed was seven to eight months of proof-of-value demonstrations; multiple rounds of testing, security audits, integration trials, and stakeholder approvals. Banks don’t move fast. Enterprise procurement doesn’t favor startups.
“It took like 7-8 months to close with them after doing a series of proof of value,” Awe recalls.
When Stanbic finally signed, it validated more than Flowmono’s product; it validated the strategy: build for enterprise, price for Africa, compete on value, not just cost.
More importantly, Stanbic became proof. If a Nigerian bank trusted Flowmono with sensitive documents and compliance workflows, other enterprises could too.
Beyond signatures: Building the operating system
By 2023, customers were no longer just asking for faster signatures. They wanted faster decisions.
Approvals stuck in email chains. Vendor onboarding delayed by manual processes. Compliance checks slowed by paperwork. Financial reviews bottlenecked by spreadsheets.
The expansion was inevitable. Between 2024 and 2025, the company launched new features to reach more customers: Flowmono Automate and Flowmono VPMC.
Flowmono Automate allows businesses to design custom workflows for HR onboarding, procurement, finance approvals, and contract management—without writing code.
Flowmono VPMC manages vendor relationships, purchase orders, and compliance documentation from a single dashboard.
“If 20% of organisations use Flowmono today, we can create interconnectivity between business processes that the world has never seen before,” Awe says.
The promise was measurable: businesses adopting Flowmono cut approval times by up to 50%, reduced compliance risk, and freed employees from manual paperwork.
Flowmono was becoming what it always intended to be: an AI workflow operating system.
The AI that signs (but never without permission)
In 2024, Flowmono integrated AI, not as a replacement for human judgment, but as an enhancement.
“Technology should make humans more human,” Awe says. “AI should handle repetitive tasks so humans can focus on strategic work.”
Flowmono’s AI now provides document summarisation, automated workflow creation, risk detection in contracts, and intelligent document search using Natural Language Processing.
The most ambitious feature: an AI co-signer.
“It doesn’t sign on your behalf autonomously,” Awe clarifies. “It reads documents, categorises them, matches them to the correct signature stored securely, and recommends actions based on rules you set.”
An executive could instruct the AI to automatically sign reimbursement requests under ₦50,000, while flagging larger contracts for manual review.
Security remains paramount. Flowmono is PCI DSS-certified and employs encryption and tokenisation to ensure signatures never touch cloud AI services.
“The AI assists, but it never replaces the human in the decision loop.”
Flowmono has scaled without traditional venture capital, supported instead by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub.
The subscription model is straightforward: ₦204,000 ($142) annually versus DocuSign’s ₦720,000 ($500) and Adobe Sign’s ₦431,820 ($301).
Customer retention is strong enough that enterprises expand from signatures into full workflow automation—suggesting real problems are being solved.
Day 1000
Flowmono’s bet is simple: African businesses will increasingly choose platforms designed for African realities, priced in local currency, compliant with local regulations (Nigeria’s Digital Economy Bill recognises electronic signatures), and supported by local teams.
The barriers to adoption are real; many businesses still rely on paper or free tools. They don’t see immediate ROI from subscription software. There’s distrust of digital systems, especially around security.
Flowmono addresses these through education, certification, and enterprise customer proof points.
“Just as digital finance has evolved, so will business processes,” Awe says. “Remote work is here to stay. E-signatures and AI-driven workflows are the next frontier.”
Awe sees Flowmono as infrastructure, not just software.
“Our ultimate goal is not just e-signing, but intelligent business automation,” he says. “We’re building the future of work in Africa—secure, efficient, and powered by AI.”
Three years after launch, Flowmono serves enterprises including Stanbic IBTC, UAC, and CardinalStone, organisations that could afford DocuSign or Adobe Sign but chose a Lagos-based alternative.
The reasons are concrete: Flowmono costs less than its international alternatives, offers same-day support in Nigerian time zones, and builds features customers actually request rather than global product roadmap priorities.
“Every customer matured us,” Okekunle reflects. “Each one forced us to earn trust, not assume it.”
Flowmono is still evolving. But the principle remains unchanged: Work should flow, not get stuck.
