Software and payments for Africa

African businesses run on disconnected tools. Hobia builds the alternative.

One system to run the business. One place the money moves. Built for the conditions African operators actually trade in, starting in Nigeria.

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  • 39.6M Nigerian MSMEs
  • 48% of GDP
  • 2 live products
01 — The gap

Four vendors. None of them speak to each other.

Point of sale from one company. Payments from another. Inventory in a notebook. Accounts in a spreadsheet only one person understands. Nothing connects, so nothing reconciles, and the owner spends the last week of every month working out what actually happened.

The patchwork

  • POS terminal vendor A
  • Card processor vendor B
  • Stock notebook paper
  • Accounts spreadsheet
  • Bookings WhatsApp

Five systems. Five versions of the truth. Month end is an investigation.

The Hobia way

Single system

Saleposted
Stockmoved
Ledgerbalanced
Paymentsettled

One record. One reconciliation. One partner.

Operations and money in the same system, because they were never really separate.

02 — Products

A group of products. One foundation.

Each Hobia product is built for a specific trade. Underneath, they share the same infrastructure: multi tenant architecture, offline first design, a real double entry ledger and integrated payments.

Flagship

Phaneum

Retail and hospitality operations

Point of sale, inventory, bookings, staff, accounting and reporting for shops, restaurants, hotels and salons, in one platform with a shared back office. The till works fully offline through an outage and reconciles cleanly when the network returns, without duplicating a sale or corrupting the books.

  • Retail, restaurant, hotel and beauty verticals
  • Offline first point of sale with idempotent sync
  • Double entry ledger that refuses to post out of balance
  • Integrated card, transfer, USSD and QR collection
Phaneum point of sale running on a counter tablet in a retail shop
Phaneum

Point of sale · Inventory · Ledger

Counter view, back office and money in one system.

Home services

MaidTrack

Dispatch, quality control and payouts

MaidTrack runs cleaning and domestic service agencies end to end. Operator onboarding and vetting, automated job matching by location, availability, rating and skill, live tracking, on site clock in, photo based quality checks and complaint resolution, then client invoicing and operator payouts on the other side.

  • Auto matching by location, availability, rating and skill
  • Live job status and automatic clock in and out
  • Photo evidence for quality checks and disputes
  • Client invoicing and operator payouts in one flow
Talk to us about MaidTrack
MaidTrack dispatch and job tracking on a phone
MaidTrack

Dispatch · Evidence · Payouts

Every job carries proof of what happened.
03 — African conditions first

Not localised. Designed here, for here.

We do not take a product built for stable power and stable internet and translate the currency. These are design constraints from the first line of code.

Robust offline operation

Power drops. Routers fail. The till does not stop. Sales are captured on device as atomic envelopes with client generated operation IDs, and every sync endpoint is idempotent, so a retry can never create a second sale.

Strict offline window, then a forced sync. Correctness over convenience where money is involved.

Native local payment methods

Cards, bank transfers, USSD, QR and mobile money, collected inside the system the business already runs on. Every payment lands against the sale that created it, so settlement and stock and ledger agree by construction.

Built today on established African payment rails through partnerships, with more of the stack moving in house as we scale.

On the ground local support

Software for this market lives or dies on whether someone picks up when a till stops working on a Saturday afternoon. Local team, local hours, local understanding of what the business is trying to do.

Years spent inside African operations, looking at real stock records and real month end closes.

$13.2BNigerian retail market, 2024
39.6MNigerian MSMEs
48%of national GDP
₦38.7TNIP transfer value, 2023

Market figures compiled from the Phaneum market research pack. Refresh before public citation.

04 — Get on the list

Build on the rails the continent runs on.

Merchant, partner, investor or engineer. Tell us who you are and we will come back to you with the right next step.

  • Pilot slots for retail, restaurant and hotel operators
  • Payment and distribution partnerships
  • Early access to the HobiaHQ ecosystem
hobiahq — onboarding

hobia@hq:~$ ./request-access

initialising HobiaHQ onboarding v1.0

region: NG   rails: ready   slots: open