Brands/Products
Zoho Unveils New Apps to Help Businesses Achieve Seamless Growth
By Dipo Olowookere
The leading global technology company, Zoho Corporation, has introduced five new apps designed to help businesses achieve seamless growth by increasing their productivity through cutting edge innovations.
A statement issued by the organisation on Wednesday said its Zoho One, which is the operating system for business, is now embedded with the five new apps, three new services and seven major platform enhancements.
With these additions, businesses now have the capability to solve disjointed data challenges and close communications gaps across silos in order to be more productive, adapt more quickly to remote and hybrid work models, and become poised for growth.
Since its release in 2017, over 40,000 organizations have chosen Zoho One as their operating system. In 2021, the platform witnessed a 60 per cent year-on-year customer growth with the average number of apps used by businesses rising to 21. It is the top-selling product for Zoho in Nigeria.
“The experience that employees, customers, partners, and suppliers get when dealing with businesses is typically a reflection of how that business and its systems are structured internally.
“Today, the majority of systems are disconnected as a result of siloed solutions offered by vendors,” the President MEA, Zoho Corp, Mr Hyther Nizam, stated.
“Unification of a business requires the unification of the underlying systems, which can then provide a truly unified experience, internally and externally, along with unified insights.
“Zoho One was created with this vision and keeps expanding its unbeatable value with new additions and improvements year over year,” Mr Nizam added.
Business Post gathered that the new apps in Zoho One include the Zoho Learn for interactive training programmes and assessments with Zoho’s course builder; Zoho Lens to facilitate better communication and collaboration in a remote-work environment; TeamInbox to eliminate task duplication and streamline email conversations in one central location; Zoho DataPrep to assist companies integrate, model, cleanse, transform, enrich, and catalogue data; and the Zoho Commerce, which allows retailers to easily build online shops with the tools needed to construct a website, accept orders, track inventory, process payments, manage shipping, market their brand, and analyse data.
The major enhancements are embedded and conversational BI; enterprise search; unified console, dashboards, and smart-stack UI; customizable dashboard with pre-built widgets; and integration with telephony providers.
The three new services included in Zoho One are work graph; organisation dictionary; and Mobile Application Management (MAM), which enables admins to easily add and manage all of their users’ devices for better insight and control of provisioning, specific app permissions and policies, locking and wiping devices remotely, and more, to support employee mobility and flexibility.
According to the statement, pricing for the new package starts at N7800 per employee per month and this can be done via https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
An institutional investor, First Ally Capital, has strengthened a leading Nigerian financial technology company, Mathesis Analytics, to scale its proprietary credit decisioning infrastructure.
It made this possible by injecting fresh capital into the firm, which specialises in AI-powered credit decisioning infrastructure, an action that will directly support the growth and scaling of Mathesis’ core mission of providing the intelligence and infrastructure needed to bridge the credit gap for millions of unscored or underscored individuals across Nigeria.
With this investment, Mathesis will enable financial institutions to confidently assess and extend credit to borrowers who lack a formal credit history by leveraging an expanded pool of alternative behavioural and transactional data.
To date, Mathesis’ systems have supported more than 8 million loans for over 2 million unique borrowers in Nigeria, and the company is actively deploying its infrastructure to establish a growing pan-African footprint.
With the investment from First Ally Capital, Mathesis is well positioned to transform how the credit ecosystem operates, driving financial inclusion in partnership with lenders across the continent.
A significant barrier to credit access in Nigeria, which prides itself on being Africa’s largest economy, is data fragmentation. Borrowers frequently build positive financial behaviours across multiple digital platforms by repaying microfinance loans, saving through fintech wallets, or servicing Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) facilities.
However, under traditional credit infrastructure, these achievements remain invisible to new lenders.
Mathesis addresses this challenge through the concept of Personal Equity—the quantified expression of an individual’s financial behaviour aggregated across every institution with which they have transacted.
By translating these disparate signals into a precise, portable measure of creditworthiness, Mathesis creates a comprehensive credit identity that reflects the full breadth of a person’s financial life.
“True financial inclusion cannot be achieved in a vacuum; it requires structural collaboration in which lenders and fintech companies work as partners within the ecosystem.
“This investment from First Ally Capital validates our approach to reshaping credit infrastructure. By quantifying Personal Equity, we empower lenders to safely look beyond the constraints of formal credit histories and recognise a borrower’s true creditworthiness. This capital enables us to accelerate our pan-African expansion while maintaining the robust, institutional-grade infrastructure our partners rely on,” the chief executive of Mathesis Analytics, Winston Osuchukwu, stated.
On his part, the chief executive of First Ally Capital, Mr Ebenezer Olufowose, said, “At First Ally Capital, we pride ourselves on being a one-stop destination for financial solutions, offering a diverse portfolio of services ranging from investment banking and asset management to trusteeship, inclusive banking, and real estate.
“Our investment in Mathesis Analytics reflects our strong belief in the company’s vision and our commitment to supporting forward-thinking enterprises that deliver excellence.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
The chief executive of Canal+ Africa, Mr David Mignot, has disclosed that MultiChoice is now fully integrated into the media group.
Mr Mignot disclosed this via a statement issued on Thursday, noting that this development marks a new phase in the evolution of one of Africa’s leading pay television operators.
He noted that the integration positions MultiChoice within a global media organisation with an extensive international footprint.
“MultiChoice is now a full subsidiary of a truly international media group operating in 70 countries. The group was founded in France, is listed in London and Johannesburg, and has a strong African presence with operations in more than 45 countries,” Mr Mignot said.
The statement underscores the scale of the combined business, highlighting Canal+’s global reach alongside its significant investments across Africa.
The completion of the transaction is expected to strengthen MultiChoice’s position in the African media and entertainment market by giving it access to the broader resources, expertise and international capabilities of the Canal+ Group, while reinforcing the group’s commitment to the continent.
MultiChoice operates across sub-Saharan Africa through platforms including DStv and GOtv, serving millions of subscribers with entertainment, sports and news content.
By Adedapo Adesanya
FoodCourt, a Nigerian cloud kitchen startup backed by Y Combinator, has suspended operations after months of unpaid salaries and mounting debts to vendors triggered a staff strike and forced the company to halt customer orders, according to a report by TechCabal.
The publication reported that customers first noticed on March 4 that they could no longer place orders through the FoodCourt app after the company disabled ordering as kitchen workers, delivery personnel and branch staff embarked on strike over unpaid wages. The company also owed outstanding payments to vendors.
By April 19, FoodCourt had temporarily shut its last operating branch after suspending activities across its Lagos and Abuja locations while seeking fresh funding and restructuring the business, according to the report.
The company’s chief executive, Mr Henry Nneji, said the decision to pause operations was not caused by a single issue but by a combination of operational, organisational and working-capital challenges.
“It’s important to clarify that the decision to pause operations wasn’t driven by one single issue. We reached a point where it became clear that continuing to patch those issues while operating wasn’t the right long-term decision,” he said.
“The objective is to build a stronger business than the one that existed before the suspension. We fully intend to bring FoodCourt back,” he added in an emailed response.
The company acknowledged outstanding obligations to employees, vendors, riders and service providers, but declined to disclose the number of affected workers or the total amount owed. It said efforts were underway to resolve the liabilities as part of its restructuring process.
It was also reported that the startup’s financial difficulties worsened after expansion into additional locations increased operating costs, while its cloud kitchen model came under pressure from rising labour, logistics, food and marketing expenses.
Despite the shutdown, Mr Nneji said FoodCourt intends to relaunch after completing its restructuring, adding that the company believes demand for its products remains strong.
Founded in 2021 by Henry Nneji and Paul Adokiye Iruene, FoodCourt operates cloud kitchens under multiple virtual restaurant brands through its consumer app. According to TechCabal, the startup had previously disclosed raising $1.7 million, delivering more than one million meals and reaching $4.3 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2024.
