Ageiro, a Cape Town-based artificial intelligence startup that builds fully autonomous AI agents capable of handling end-to-end business processes, has closed a $3 million pre-Series A round led by Knife Capital and 4Di Capital, with participation from First Circle Capital and several prominent African angels.
Founded in 2023 by former Andela and Jumia executives Thabo Mokoena and Leila Abdullahi, Ageiro’s platform allows small and medium enterprises to create “digital workers” that can independently manage HR onboarding, payroll reconciliation, customer support ticketing, inventory re-ordering, and even debt collection all in local languages and with minimal human oversight.
The company claims its agents already operate successfully in low-bandwidth environments common across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, where many of the continent’s estimated 33 million informal businesses still run on WhatsApp, Excel sheets, and paper ledgers.
“Most automation tools are built for Fortune 500 companies with perfect data,” said CEO Thabo Mokoena in an interview today. “We trained our models on the messy, multilingual reality of African SMEs’ incomplete records, voice notes instead of emails, and power cuts every afternoon. The result is an AI workforce that doesn’t just assist humans; it replaces entire back-office teams for a fraction of the cost.”
Ageiro reports that its largest customer, a Lagos-based logistics provider with 1,200 drivers, reduced administrative headcount by 68% within four months while cutting payroll errors to near zero.
The new funding will be used to triple the engineering team in Cape Town, open a second office in Nairobi, and launch ready-made “digital worker” templates tailored to high-growth sectors such as ride-hailing, micro-lending, and solar distribution.
“Informal businesses employ more than 80% of Africa’s workforce but have been completely ignored by traditional enterprise software,” said Keet van Zyl, partner at Knife Capital. “Ageiro is proving that frontier-grade AI can be profitable and impactful at the base of the pyramid not just in Sandton boardrooms.”
The round comes amid a broader rebound in African venture funding, with AI-native startups capturing an increasing share of dollars. Ageiro says it is already revenue-positive and expects to cross $10 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026.
As regulators across the continent warm to AI-driven credit scoring and fraud detection, startups like Ageiro are positioning themselves at the intersection of automation and financial inclusion promising to bring millions of informal entrepreneurs into the digital economy without requiring them to become tech experts overnight.
