For small business owners across Kenya, running a shop often means managing several disconnected systems at once: a notebook for sales, a separate app for payments, WhatsApp for customer orders and yet another tool for tax compliance.
Annick Gulenywa, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of tech company Veira, believes this fragmentation is a problem worth solving.
What Veira Is Building
Gulenywa is part of a growing generation of African entrepreneurs building technology not for large corporations, but for the everyday businesses that quietly power local economies.
Rather than asking merchants to juggle multiple applications, the platform consolidates sales, inventory management, payments, tax compliance and AI-powered business intelligence into a single system.
The company also pairs the software with SmartPOS hardware, placing the technology directly at the merchant’s counter where transactions actually happen.
The target users range from supermarkets and pharmacies to agrovets, fashion retailers and other small enterprises competing in tight markets while facing rising costs and increasing compliance demands.
Many of these businesses still rely on spreadsheets or pen-and-paper records to get through the day.
By integrating AI-powered analytics, Veira aims to give small retailers access to the kind of business intelligence that larger companies take for granted.
A shop owner could, for instance, identify which products are selling fastest, spot patterns in their operations and make decisions rooted in data rather than instinct alone.
Tony Elumelu Foundation Backs the Startup
Veira’s credibility received a significant lift when the Tony Elumelu Foundation selected it for the 2025 Entrepreneurship Programme, a well-regarded initiative that supports African entrepreneurs through funding, mentorship and business development resources.
In May 2026, Veira received grant funding from the Foundation, giving the startup additional firepower as it works to scale its technology.
The backing places Veira among a broader cohort of African-led ventures tackling real, everyday problems through locally developed innovation.
Gulenywa argues that sophisticated digital tools have largely served banks, telecoms companies and large corporations.
Veira is betting that the same infrastructure, redesigned for simplicity and affordability, can reach the businesses historically left at the margins of the digital economy.
The real measure of success, as Gulenywa sees it, will not be how advanced the technology is, but whether a small business finds it genuinely useful in running their business day to day.
