Managing business finances in Africa typically involves using scattered tools: accounting and budgeting softwares, banking and payroll apps, multiple Excel sheets, separate email trails for financial tasks. These disconnected systems create inefficiencies and blindspots that make it difficult for businesses to monitor spending and stay in control of their finances.
While most African fintechs have largely focused on consumer payments, solutions for a unified finance management tool for businesses remain scarce due to low demand and technical complexity. In 2024, the Middle East and Africa market for digital business finance tools was valued at $701 million, yet adoption remains low as only about 15% of enterprises in Africa use online accounting tools.
In 2021, while working at Paystack, Beninese tech entrepreneur Cossi Achille Arouko conceived the idea of building a personal finance and expense management app that could connect to his bank accounts to automate spending and remittances while tracking transactions in real-time. But he began shifting its focus to serve businesses after interest began to materialise from business leaders.
At the time, Africa’s fintech space was already crowded with consumer-focused payments startups. Seeing an overlooked opportunity to serve businesses, Arouko teamed up with Samy Chiba, who was then working at Ariane Space, to pivot to a business-to-business (B2B) platform in 2022 that would become Bujeti.
Backed by Y-Combinator, Bujeti, enables African businesses automate and manage their expenses through digital payments, corporate cards, and customised operations including budgeting and team management. While it allows businesses to issue cards to upper management employees, including accountants and managers, it also enforces spending policies, processes bulk payments, and manages multi-currency transactions.
As the startup matured, both founders resigned from their respective jobs to focus on Bujeti full-time: Arouko as CEO and Chiba as COO. By December 2023, they began fundraising and closed a $2 million seed round led by YC within a week.
“Most companies have efficient finance management problems, but nobody is building solutions for them,” Arouko said. “There are so many solutions for consumers that don’t go as far as I would like in serving businesses. There were business banking and neobank solutions emerging at the time, but they focused mostly on moving and collecting money, not on helping businesses manage their overall finances.”
By centralising financial management for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Bujeti helps them build structured finance systems and manage accounting operations such as reporting, payables, invoicing, budgeting, procurement, and spending analysis. It also enables companies to set spending limits, automate approvals and payments, and track every transaction in real time, all within a unified system.
Fintech for businesses bet
Since 2022, Bujeti has operated through its web application, which business finance teams use to streamline operations and keep their finances organised. The platform enables companies to manage spending, approvals, and transactions in one place, giving managers real-time visibility into workflow progress and how money moves in their companies.
The company is now integrating into a mobile app that serves as a B2B superapp and set to be launched at the end of October. Beyond financial teams, the app will onboard staff and other core stakeholders into the company’s dashboard.
For onboarding, businesses sign up on the app, provide relevant documents, including personal identification and certificate of incorporation as required by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for account opening and verification, and are onboarded into Bujeti’s system after compliance checks and approval. It allows businesses to add employees, vendors, and other stakeholders to their account’s dashboard, issue them a corporate card, and assign permissions or approval limits according to internal finance structure and policy.
“You can collaborate with vendors when you add them to your account,” Arouko said. “Everything you do automatically reflects on their side, so they don’t ask you for payment because they have seen that you have already initiated the payment on your site.”
Bujeti generates revenue through user subscriptions and transaction fees. It charges ₦10,000 ($6.7) per month for its basic plan and ₦20,000 ($13.4) for the pro plan, with customised pricing available for larger teams. “As your company grows, you can add more user seats to your account and pay for the extra access,” Aroukoe explained.
Seyi William-Ogunbiyi, Chief Operating Officer at Selar, an e-commerce enterprise, said his company relies on Bujeti for budgeting and expense management, though its payroll still runs on a separate platform. Before adopting Bujeti, William-Ogunbiyi said his team had to navigate multiple banking platforms and tools just to complete basic financial operations.
“Having quick access to money and being able to easily spend it is of vital importance to us,” he said. “Bujeti has streamlined our operations, especially in budgeting and expense management.”
He noted Bujeti’s bulk upload feature, which helps his team process reimbursements and make multiple payments more efficiently at once. “It’s a clear improvement over internet banking, where you have to add each payee manually,” he said.
While Selar has a corporate card with Bujeti, William-Ogunbiyi says he rarely uses it since the company already manages other cards. He said he’s looking forward to Bujeti’s upcoming mobile app. “A mobile app would make a huge difference,” he said. “It would improve the experience by allowing quick access to financial operations and transactions, even when you’re not on your laptop.”
Beyond expense management, the app is powered by AI to automate accounting processes and expenses, and detect anomalies. The system can flag suspicious payments, errors, and automatically enforce company policies. When businesses upload documents such as employee handbooks or spending guidelines, they are interpreted and applied as rules.
“A company’s policy that sits in, maybe, a 50-page PDF that nobody reads, with Bujeti, once uploaded, the rules are enforced instantly,” he said. “Imagine discovering your supplier is charging more than the market average or you’ve been billed twice for the same service, Bujeti will show you this and recommend renegotiation.”
“You can use our cards to subscribe for things so we can control that thing and know when your next payment is due, or we can know how much you’re supposed to pay, we can also check all around and know the price has changed,” he added.
Every transaction passes through an automated approval chain before payment. When vendors are added to a company’s account, both sides can track the same financial activity, reducing unnecessary payment reminders. “The processes will go through approval checks until the last person who is required to approve, then the money goes.”
With the AI, the system cross-checks transactions against fraud alerts, warning users when a vendor has been flagged as risky by banks. It tracks subscriptions and price changes, notifying users of unneeded recurring charges that drain resources over time.
Bujeti considers Duplo, Kuda, and Flex Finance as its close competitors; Arouko argues that most of these companies operate as expense management and business banking platforms. According to him, Bujeti goes beyond payments and business banking to embed financial discipline and efficiency into business operations using automation and data analytics. That difference, he believes, sets the company apart.
A continent-wide drive
While Bujeti describes itself as servicing African businesses, it currently supports transactions in the Nigerian naira, Kenyan shilling, and US dollar, with plans to add Ghana and francophone markets such as the Benin Republic (Achille’s home country). It has concluded plans to add the Euro and the Pound Sterling. Its cards are multi-currency, allowing customers to hold and spend in any of these currencies seamlessly. Arouko added that his co-founder, Chiba, a Moroccan, will help give Bujeti a solid foothold in North Africa as the company expands.
Still, expansion has not been without challenges. Arouko said regulation remains a major hurdle for expansion into new markets, adding that the company is working through legal requirements as it prepares to add more countries. To navigate these barriers, Bujeti relies on strategic partnerships with local players like SMEDAN (Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria) and payments company, Paystack.
“We need banking licences to be able to issue accounts, and through partnerships, the banks will make that possible. Obviously, banks hold the money. We don’t hold the money, so at least that’s how we are able to navigate.”
Beyond finance management, Bujeti also enables cross-border payments for African businesses, allowing businesses to send and receive money across different markets.
Arouko wants Bujeti to be one of the most widely adopted financial management platforms in Africa. “In five years, we want to be among the top three tools that any African business considers essential for managing its finances.”
