When Talstack launched in 2022 it looked, at first glance, like another corporate learning portal: a slick catalogue of short video courses delivered by African operators for an African workforce. It was clean, intuitive, and not unlike Udemy or Coursera.
“We looked at the landscape and asked ourselves, what’s the fastest way into the system?” said Seni Sulyman, Talstack’s co-founder and CEO. “Learning was the obvious entry point. It’s the lowest-friction problem companies are willing to solve immediately.” 
What many didn’t know at the time was that the course library was merely phase one of a much larger playbook: a full-stack people operations platform designed for Africa’s evolving workforce. Internally, Talstack organises this ambition into a three-part framework: learn, perform, engage, and has been building toward it ever since.
Learning that pays for itself
Talstack’s learning platform is now markedly different from its early version. What began as a modest catalogue of 80 short-form courses has expanded to over 300 across categories like finance, supply chain, operations, and artificial intelligence. Today, companies can mix this content with their own via a lightweight learning management system (LMS), creating structured “learning paths” for new hires, managers, or even underperforming staff.
“Companies no longer need to cobble together Excel lists and YouTube links,” Sulyman said. “Now, an HR team can build a full learning program in minutes and track who’s watching what, when, and for how long.” 
Talstack claims its real innovation isn’t in the content but in the delivery. Each Talstack course ends with a to-do, a framework designed to drive immediate action. “The goal is that when someone finishes a course, they can apply the concept the next day,” explained co-founder Kayode Oyewole. “That way, even if the employee leaves nine months later, you’ve already captured the ROI.”
“We’re not trying to inspire people. We’re trying to help them close performance gaps,” Oyewole said.
Last month, Talstack unveiled Perform, its performance-management module. Built to be “the simplest 360-review tool on the market,” the feature allows admins to set up goal cycles, define feedback workflows (self, peer, upward, manager), toggle culture-specific settings like anonymity, and visualize results—all in one streamlined interface.
“This might be, even on a global level, one of the simplest tools to use,” Sulyman said during a live demo. “HR teams are overwhelmed. Performance reviews shouldn’t be another painful admin task.” 
The product design is informed by painful firsthand experience. “We’ve used global tools. You submit feedback into a black hole. It’s bloated and slow. Our customers were still running review cycles on Excel,” Sulyman said. “We’re making this simple, modern, and useful in context.”
What competition?
Talstack’s move into performance management puts it squarely in competition with Nigeria’s HR-tech players—SeamlessHR, PaidHR, NotchHR, and others. “We’re much less worried about competition,” Sulyman said. “We’re obsessed with the customer. If they say their current platform sucks, that’s a problem worth solving.” 
That customer-centricity guides Talstack’s product philosophy. The startup claims it won’t build anything unless they believe they can do it “three times better” than what already exists. “Payroll, for example, is unlikely to be built in-house anytime soon. If it’s working well elsewhere, we’d rather integrate,” Oyewole said. “The goal isn’t to win alone. It’s to win with everyone else winning.” 
Still, Sulyman and Oyewole admit their ambitions go well beyond reviews and courses.
The duo’s north star is to make Talstack the single source of truth for every African employee’s skills, performance, and growth trajectory so future employers request a Talstack Score, not a résumé.
That score—a composite index based on learning activity, performance reviews, skills gaps, and behavioral signals—is already in development. Every course watched, goal tracked, review submitted, and to-do completed contributes to a talent’s overall Talstack Score.
“We want Talstack to be the single home for managing people—learning, performance, skill development, succession planning, everything,” he said. “Resumés are guesswork,” Oyewole said. “The Talstack Score tells the real story—what you know, what you’ve done, and how you’ve grown over time.” 
To power this dream, Talstack raised additional (undisclosed) funding in 2024. The startup also raised a $850,000 pre-seed in 2022. The business operates a straightforward SaaS model: companies pay a fixed monthly fee per employee, billed annually or semi-annually. “About 90 percent of our customers are on long-term plans,” Sulyman said. “Only our largest enterprise clients get bespoke pricing.” 
The business currently has clients ranging from conglomerates like UAC Foods with over 2,000 staff to construction firms, hospitals and oil-and-gas outfits. Sulyman also notes that Talstack is live in multiple African markets beyond Nigeria.
What comes next?
The final piece in Talstack’s Operation Software is “engage”, a culture and sentiment layer scheduled for public launch later this year. It will include Employee Net Promoter Score polls (eNPS polls), pulse surveys, and analytics that track how employees feel—not just what they do.
Because Engage sits on the same data spine as Learn and Perform, the module will allow companies to correlate morale with learning and performance data, for instance, identifying that a demotivated team also missed its OKRs or skipped key training modules.
“It’s about giving leaders the full picture,” Sulyman said. “Not just what people are achieving, but how they’re experiencing the workplace.”
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