The first version of Bujeti was built to help African businesses issue expense cards to their employees.
As a tech lead at Paystack, co-founder and CEO Cossi Achille Arouko noticed that while payments were getting more seamless for African businesses, managing their finances wasn’t getting that much attention.
He left Paystack to start Bujeti in 2021 with co-founder and chief operating officer Samy Chiba. Today, over a thousand teams use Bujeti for a range of functions, including spend management, payments, payroll, and tax management.
That expansion is important because Bujeti is no longer really competing to be the company that gives businesses cards. It is trying to become the system through which businesses understand and control their money.
Cross-border payments for businesses
Live long enough and you may find yourself a cross-border payment business. Bujeti has lived long enough and now has cross-border payments enabled for its users. But where most fintechs go for consumer cross-border payments, it has limited itself to businesses.
“Consumer cross-border is the most contested market on this continent. There are good companies in it, the margins are thin, and the competition eventually becomes a question of who has the cheapest float. We have no edge there and no appetite for it,” Arouko shares.
Business cross-border payments, he notes, are fundamentally different from consumer cross-border payments.
Where a consumer is often the only decision maker involved in disbursing payments, the opposite is true in a business. Approvals, currency management, and records are all essential steps for the business.
“For a person, cross-border payment is a transaction. For a business, it is a record that happens to involve money moving,” he adds.
A business payment isn’t just about getting money from point A to point B. Who approved it, what budget it came from, what currency was used, what tax applies, which vendor received it, and how it should appear in the company’s books are all valuable information the business needs.
As more African businesses operate across multiple countries, that complexity will only increase.
Bujeti already supports businesses across several African markets and is building around the idea that businesses should not need a different financial system every time they enter a new market.
With fintechs, banks, and organisations like PAPSS working hard to make cross-border payments more seamless, Arouko argues that being the ledger will become even more valuable.
Baking AI into business finances
After building systems that help businesses manage their money, Bujeti is now leveraging artificial intelligence to deliver even more value to its users.
The motivation, Arouko shares, is to go from simply helping a business structure its accounts to helping it understand what those structures mean. The solution it has come up with is four AI specialists working in tandem with businesses.
Fetch pulls documents from email and storage, extracting the data. Chaser runs collections across email, SMS, and WhatsApp and can even negotiate payment plans for customers that cannot settle in full. Watchdog scans transactions, vendors, and contracts daily to raise alerts. And Concierge answers questions while leveraging its understanding of a business’s processes and policies.
This is where Bujeti’s ambition starts to make more sense. A typical small business may not have a CFO, financial controller, tax specialist, collections officer, and procurement team. It may have one person doing most of these jobs, often with a spreadsheet, WhatsApp, a bank portal, and a lot of institutional knowledge.
Bujeti is essentially asking if software could fill some of those gaps.
“In Nigeria, small businesses operate in an environment where financial visibility and cash-flow discipline can determine whether a business survives. For businesses that contribute a significant share of the economy, money that you cannot track, control or account for is not an inconvenience. It is an existential risk,” he says.
Arouko frames this evolution as a natural progression of Africa’s business landscape. Where the first and second decades focused on consumer payments and business payments, respectively, the third, he says, will focus on intelligence.
Other fintech companies in Africa appear to agree with him. Earlier this year, Paystack launched Paystack Index, an AI agent that lets users complete everyday transactions like buying airtime or sending money.
Xara is another fintech that provides access to AI that enables users to send money, track spending, or pay bills within WhatsApp.
But there is an important difference between using AI to execute a transaction and using AI to understand a business. Bujeti is betting on the latter.
With AI agents famously running amok, small businesses may be wary of introducing agents to their business. But Arouko shares that Bujeti’s AI agents have strict permissions on what they can do.
In this case, the agents, which it calls Teammates, are not permitted to move money. Beyond restricting the Teammates from moving money, Bujeti has limited access to what each agent can do and even limited its confidence threshold.
Concierge, for example, is designed to declare its ignorance where the data required to provide an accurate response is missing.
For financial software, confidently giving the wrong answer is potentially more damaging than not giving an answer at all. An AI that tells a founder it does not know is less useful in the moment but potentially more trustworthy over time.
Building the virtual CFO for ambitious African businesses
Bujeti’s goal for the future is ambitious yet simple: anyone who wants to build a business in Africa should be able to find all their financial needs met in one platform.
Bujeti wants to be that one place, but for that to happen, it must first surmount three challenges.
The first is coverage. “A CFO in the room is only as useful as what is in the room,” Arouko tells Condia.
Only a handful of African businesses use online accounting tools. The rest make do with some combination of paper records, WhatsApp, a spreadsheet that often lives on one person’s device, or worse still, historical knowledge that is only stored in a person’s brain.
Bujeti says getting all of that knowledge into one system is key. But it must first figure out how to get customers to trust it at scale.
This is perhaps the biggest problem with the virtual CFO idea. You cannot give useful financial advice about a business if you cannot see the business. And getting businesses to put all their financial information into one platform is not easy.
Founders have spent years building their own systems, however messy they may be. Accountants have their own tools. Banks have their own portals. Employees have their own processes. Convincing all of them to move into one system is a distribution problem before it is a technology problem.
The second problem Arouko identifies is context. Having operational context for a business is increasingly becoming valuable, and Bujeti acknowledges it must build that context if it will become the default choice for its users.
The third obstacle is the human factor. Where a human CFO can take actions and be held accountable for them, software is unable to do so. This is why Bujeti’s current restrictions around its AI agents matter.
The company is trying to automate decisions without giving software unchecked authority over a company’s money.
Yet, Arouko highlights what could be the biggest issue so far: requesting businesses to entrust their financial history into a system before the system shows them the benefit of doing so.
This creates a fintech chicken-and-egg problem. The more information Bujeti has, the more useful it can become. But the more information it wants, the more trust it needs to earn.
Bujeti has spent the last few years moving up the financial stack, from cards to spend management, payments, tax, payroll, and now AI. The next step is to make all of that information work together.
If it can, Bujeti won’t just know where a business’s money went. It could tell the founder where the business is headed, what could go wrong, and what needs attention before it becomes a problem.
That is a much harder product to build than a corporate card. It is also a much bigger opportunity.
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Last updated: September 16, 2026
