By Adedapo Adesanya

Nigerian startup, Decide, has emerged as the fourth most accurate Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent for spreadsheet tasks globally, according to results from SpreadsheetBench, a widely referenced benchmark for evaluating AI performance on real-world spreadsheet problems.

According to the founder, Mr Abiodun Adetona, the ranking places Decide alongside well-funded global AI startups, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Mr Adetona, an ex-Flutterwave developer, also revealed that Decide now has over 3,000 users, including some who are paying customers, a signal to the ability of the startup to scale in the near future.

SpreadsheetBench is a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to push Large Language Models (LLMs) to their limits in understanding and manipulating spreadsheet data. While many benchmarks focus on simple table QA, SpreadsheetBench treats a spreadsheet as a complex ecosystem involving spatial layouts, formulas, and multi-step reasoning. So far, only three agents rank higher than Decide, namely Nobie Agent, Shortcut.ai, and Qingqiu Agent.

Mr Adetona said SpreadsheetBench measures how well AI agents can handle practical spreadsheet tasks such as writing formulas, cleaning messy data, working across multiple sheets, and reasoning through complex Excel workflows. Decide recorded an 82.5% accuracy score, solving 330 out of 400 verified tasks.

“The result reflects sustained investment in applied research, product iteration, and learning from real-world spreadsheet workloads across a wide range of use cases,” Mr Adetona told Business Post.

For Mr Adetona, who built Decide out of frustration with how much time professionals spend manually cleaning data, debugging formulas, and moving between sheets, “This milestone highlights how focused engineering and domain-specific AI development can deliver frontier-level performance outside of large research organisations. By concentrating on practical business data problems and building systems grounded in real user environments, we believe smaller teams can contribute meaningfully to advancing applied AI.”

“For Decide, this is a foundation for continued progress in intelligent spreadsheet and analytics automation,” he added.

By Adedapo Adesanya

A global biometric authentication technology company specialising in secure, mobile-first identity verification, Identy.io, has announced its expansion plans into Africa with a pilot focus on Nigeria and Kenya.

The firm disclosed in a statement that it has appointed a regional leadership team to engage with key stakeholders across the government, financial services, telecommunications, and other regulated sectors in both countries.

These include Mr Olajide Olasiyan-Ola as Regional Head for West Africa, Mr Edwin Mutisya as the Senior Sales Manager, and Mr Matus Kapusta as the Product Director for Identy.io’s Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) product portfolios.

Amid the need for effective identity solutions becoming increasingly urgent, countries like Kenya and Nigeria are making significant investments in public digital infrastructure by integrating identity systems with public services, financial access, and mobile connectivity as part of their broader economic development agendas. This is helping to implement national digital identity systems to improve service delivery, promote financial inclusion, and develop digital public infrastructure.

The World Bank’s ID4D data indicates that approximately 80 per cent of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa possess basic identification. However, there are significant disparities between countries, with many having coverage below 70 per cent. These gaps hinder access to essential services and economic opportunities.

With Identy.io coming into the fold, its regional leadership team will collaborate with clients across the public and private sectors to support responsible, scalable identity implementations aligned with national digital transformation priorities.

After Nigeria and Kenya, the firm plans to expand into additional African markets as part of a phased regional growth strategy.

According to Mr Antony Vendhan, Co-founder of Identy.io, “We are transforming the traditional industry model, which often relies on expensive and inflexible digital infrastructure. Instead, Identy.io adopts a software-first approach, minimising reliance on specialised biometric hardware. Our technology supports biometric capture using standard smartphones, processes identity documents, issues digital identities to individuals lacking formal identification, and facilitates large-scale biometric verification and deduplication.”0

“This innovative yet simplified approach allows our clients to reach underserved communities by providing individuals with multimodal access to secure their digital identities and explore new economic opportunities,” he stated.

As part of Identy.io’s industry validation strategy, the company’s ABIS system has completed MOSIP’s partner compliance process and is listed on the MOSIP Marketplace. This platform offers compliant technologies that governments and ecosystem partners can evaluate for MOSIP-aligned deployments. MOSIP helps governments conceive, develop, implement, and own foundational digital ID systems tailored to their unique needs.

By Dipo Olowookere

A $2 million pre-seed round to automate compliance in real time, unlocking business velocity while giving compliance teams infrastructure to scale oversight has been received by ZeroDrift.

The fresh capital was pumped into the firm by a16z speedrun. It is to support the company’s go-to-market launch, product expansion across communication channels, and continued development of its AI-driven compliance engine.

The organisation plans to deepen its coverage across financial services before expanding its rule-based compliance engine into other regulated sectors, including insurance, healthcare, ESG disclosures, and AI governance.

The long-term vision is to become the universal trust layer for any system that communicates, ensuring that as AI and automation scale, trust, safety, and compliance scale with them.

ZeroDrift is an AI-native communication firewall that validates and fixes content before it is sent, giving compliance teams control at scale and business teams the speed to execute.

The platform encodes SEC, FINRA, and firm-specific policies into machine-readable rulepacks, then enforces them at the point of creation.

ZeroDrift integrates directly into tools teams already use, including email, browsers, CRMs, websites, social platforms, and AI systems.

Content is checked instantly, issues are flagged with suggested fixes, and compliant messages move forward without delay. Compliance teams retain full visibility through centralised dashboards, audit trails, and exam-ready evidence generated automatically.

ZeroDrift is launching initially in financial services, serving registered investment advisors, asset managers, broker-dealers, and wealth platforms.

The market includes more than 15,000 RIAs, 3,500 asset managers, and hundreds of thousands of registered representatives in the United States alone.

Early use cases include faster campaign launches, higher sales velocity, safe deployment of client-facing AI, and instant exam readiness without last-minute scrambles.

“People do not want to be non-compliant. They have no way to know if what they are writing is acceptable until it is too late.

“Compliance should be a guardrail that lets teams move faster, not a gate that slows everything down. Our goal is to make compliance happen automatically at the speed of work,” the chief executive of ZeroDrift, Kumesh Aroomoogan, said.

A representative of a16z speedrun, Troy Kirwin, said, “Compliance has quietly become a limiting factor for how fast regulated companies can operate. ZeroDrift flips that dynamic by preventing violations before they happen and making compliance a built-in part of everyday workflows.”