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Nigeria Urgently Needs National Technology Agenda—Verraki

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Leading business and technology solutions firm, Verraki Partners, has called on the Nigerian government, working in collaboration with the private sector, to urgently develop and begin to execute a national technology agenda, that will be distinctly Nigerian and will improve our competitiveness in the global economy.

Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the recently concluded 25th Nigeria Economic Summit, Senior Manager for Technology Application Services at Verraki, Olatunde Olajide who facilitated the summit’s Industry Breakfast Meeting on Information and Communications Technology, advocated the need for Nigeria to overturn its perceived unwelcome stereotype and emulate countries like Israel, China, Singapore and South Korea that have all articulated and implemented a national agenda which has in turn helped them to create specific niches, improve their reputation while fostering economic growth.

In his submission, though Nigeria boasts of Africa’s largest young population, bursting with entrepreneurial energy, tremendous resolve, resilience and creativity, the nation is yet to articulate a holistic agenda as a counternarrative to the damaging reports of fraud, corruption and unemployment.

He asserts that this biased perspective has a negative impact on the country’s perception, creating a drawback to our ability to attract new investment and ultimately our future economic potential.

In pressing for a national ICT agenda, Olajide quoted “Following its release of an Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, China outlined AI as a national priority, expressed its commitment to building a domestic AI industry worth US$150 billion and leading AI globally by 2030.

“China has already introduced AI pilot programmes in hundreds of schools and training teachers to implement the new curricula throughout the country. Nigeria must define what its strategic ICT agenda is, in the global economy and work towards this”.

He continued “There is a lot Nigeria can do in a global economy; Nigeria is home to the leading hubs for entrepreneurship on the continent thanks to several strengths, including our resilient entrepreneurs,  a growing number of engaging international investors, a huge population with increasing access to technology, a growing number of startup support organizations active in the ecosystem, over 84 million hectares of arable land with less than half cultivated for agriculture production, our creative industries especially music and Nollywood, a booming billion dollar film industry. We must harness these strengths to determine how best we can play in the global economy”.

Olajide also highlighted the importance of local content and skills in the country’s IT agenda and encouraged local enterprises and governments to patronize companies with Research & Development, Product Development and Manufacturing operations in Nigeria to help in developing natonal technology competence.

“China, South Korea, Japan’s competencies were not built in a day. I remember people scorned Asian (Japan, South Korea and China) cars some decades ago. The path to development is an iterative process and we must encourage our local players so they can improve.

“Given the low national literacy level of 66%, we need to aggressively scale digital literacy training for teachers, students, and others while also establishing systems and structures for protection of contents and IP rights of our inventors and entrepreneurs”, he concluded.

The 25th edition of the Nigerian Economic Summit, a public-private dialogue held recently in Abuja and was supported by Verraki Partners.

Since its inception, NESG has promoted its activities around six fundamental principles of the economy. It includes a commitment to a Free Market Economy, encouragement of Private Sector Investments, Creation of an Enabling Environment, Good Governance in the National Interest, Rule-Based Economy and the Establishment of Economic Foundation for Democracy.

Verraki is focused on implementing technology and business solutions designed inherently for Africa and fit for purpose, while curating business ventures that would contribute to unlocking new sources of growth across the continent.

Led by foremost corporate professionals as well as former Accenture leadership in Nigeria, Verraki will apply its global expertise and local insights to partner with enterprises and governments to accelerate the development and transformation of Africa by providing business solutions uniquely tailored for Africa.

Dipo Olowookere is a journalist based in Nigeria that has passion for reporting business news stories. At his leisure time, he watches football and supports 3SC of Ibadan. Mr Olowookere can be reached via [email protected]

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Truecaller, AnyMind Group to Expand Direct Sales Footprint

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New Truecaller Logo

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

The leading global communications platform, Truecaller, now has a strategic direct sales reseller partnership with AnyMind Group, a Business-Process-as-a-Service company for marketing, e-commerce and digital transformation.

Under this partnership, AnyMind Group will serve as the exclusive intermediary for Truecaller’s advertising inventory across Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam.

The scope of the partnership is focused specifically on enabling brands and agencies to leverage Truecaller’s premium ad formats to reach highly engaged, high-intent users through relevant, data-driven advertising solutions.

Through this collaboration, Truecaller will accelerate its direct advertising business across the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) and Southeast Asia (SEA) regions.

With a strong on-ground presence and established relationships with leading advertisers and agencies across MENA and SEA markets, AnyMind Group brings deep regional expertise that will support the scaling of Truecaller’s advertising footprint locally.

The partnership is designed to empower brands with impactful placements on Truecaller’s trusted communications platform, helping drive meaningful engagement with users in these fast-growing digital economies.

“As Truecaller continues to expand its global advertising business, partnerships with strong regional players like AnyMind Group are critical to delivering localised expertise and measurable outcomes for advertisers.

“MENA and Southeast Asia represent high-growth markets with evolving digital maturity, and through this collaboration, we aim to bring brands closer to consumers via trusted and contextual communication experiences on our platform,” the Vice President and Global Head for Truecaller Ads Business, Hemant Arora, said.

Also, the Managing Director for Growth Markets at AnyMind Group, Aditya Aima, said, “We are excited to partner with Truecaller to open its inventory to brands across MENA and Southeast Asia. With Truecaller’s scale and trusted user ecosystem, combined with our market depth and networks, we see strong potential to drive more relevant, high-impact advertising outcomes for advertisers looking to deepen engagement in these dynamic markets.”

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Capillary Technologies Acquires SessionM from Mastercard

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Capillary Technologies SessionM

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

A software product company established in 2012, Capillary Technologies India Limited, has acquired the customer engagement and loyalty company, SessionM, from Mastercard.

This followed a definitive agreement signed by the global leader in AI-powered customer loyalty and engagement solutions with the renowned digital payments firm.

The acquisition of SessionM is the latest in a series of strategic moves by Capillary, following its successful listing on the Indian Stock Exchange in November 2025.

With SessionM in its portfolio, Capillary reinforces its position as a global leader in enterprise loyalty, offering a leading platform to the world’s most sophisticated enterprise brands.

Mastercard has identified Capillary Technologies—consistently recognised as a Leader in The Forrester Wave as the ideal partner to lead SessionM into its next era of growth.

As part of the agreement, a specialised team within SessionM will transition to Capillary, ensuring that the platform’s deep technical expertise is preserved.

SessionM’s esteemed global customer base—which includes Fortune 500 retailers, airlines, and CPG brands—will continue to receive the same high-calibre support and service they experienced before the acquisition.

“M&A has been a key growth strategy for Capillary over the years, and as a public company, we are delivering on that promise to our shareholders and the market.

“By bringing SessionM into our portfolio, we are not just expanding our footprint across the globe; we are further strengthening our loyalty capabilities to deliver one of the industry’s most comprehensive offerings.

“Our mission remains to provide enterprises across industries with specialised, AI-native loyalty technology solutions,” the chief executive of Capillary Technologies, Aneesh Reddy, commented.

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Emergent Ventures, Others Invest $2.2m in Potpie

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potpie engineering software $2.2m capital

By Dipo Olowookere

About $2.2 million pre-seed round to help engineering teams unify context across their entire stack and make AI agents genuinely useful in complex software environments has been announced by Potpie.

Potpie was established by Aditi Kothari and Dhiren Mathur, who were determined to unify context across the entire engineering stack and enabling spec driven development.

As generative AI adoption accelerates, most tools focus on surface-level code generation while ignoring the deeper problem of context.

Large language models are powerful, but without access to system-level understanding, tooling history, and architectural intent, they struggle in real production environments.

Traditional approaches rely on senior engineers to manually hold this context together, a model that breaks down at scale and fails when AI agents are introduced.

The platform enables teams to automate high-impact and non-trivial use cases across the software development lifecycle, like debugging cross-service failures, maintaining and writing end-to-end tests, blast radius detection and system design.

It is designed for enterprise companies with large and complex codebases, starting at around one million lines of code and scaling to hundreds of millions.

Rather than acting as another coding assistant, Potpie builds a graphical representation of software systems, infers behaviour and patterns across modules, and creates structured artefacts that allow agents to operate consistently and safely.

A statement made available to Business Post on Monday revealed that the funding support came from Emergent Ventures, All In Capital, DeVC and Point One Capital.

The capital will be used to support early enterprise deployments, expand the engineering team, and continue building Potpie’s core context and agent infrastructure, it was disclosed.

“As AI makes code generation easier, the real challenge shifts to reasoning across massive, interconnected systems. Potpie is our answer to that shift, an ontology-first layer that helps enterprises truly understand and manage their software,” Kothari was quoted as saying in the disclosure.

A Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures, Anupam Rastogi, said, “In large enterprises, the real challenge is not generating code, it is understanding the system deeply enough to change it safely.

“Potpie’s ontology-first architecture, combined with rigorous context curation and spec-driven development, creates a structured model of the entire engineering ecosystem. This allows AI agents to reason across services, dependencies, tickets, and production signals with the clarity of a senior engineer. That is what makes Potpie uniquely capable of solving complex RCA, impact analysis, and high-risk feature work even in codebases exceeding 50 million lines.”

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