After a NIPOST snub, Maiaddy built its own address infrastructure

In 2024, Maiaddy, a Nigerian location identity infrastructure startup, approached the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) with a proposal. The company had built technology it believed could strengthen Nigeria’s addressing infrastructure and hoped to partner with the agency. The partnership never materialised.

“We tried various ways — emailed the postmaster-general, tagged her, NIPOST and the ministry aggressively on social media posts and even used third parties. None worked,” Obinna Onyejeli, the startup’s CEO, shared.

Rather than wait for government buy-in, the company decided to build on top of itself. The first result is Maimaps, a location intelligence platform launching with consumer, developer, and enterprise products aimed at one of Nigeria’s oldest problems — its inability to describe places consistently.

Addressing is everybody’s problem

Over the last decade, e-commerce has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Food delivery platforms have become commonplace, ride-hailing apps have changed urban transportation, and financial institutions increasingly rely on digital channels to serve customers. Yet behind all that growth, addressing remains a major bottleneck.

A ride-hailing driver still calls to ask for directions before pickup. Dispatch riders routinely spend several minutes trying to locate customers. Businesses and individuals have to maintain informal landmarks because formal addresses are often unreliable. Not even government agencies are spared from this.

The economic cost is substantial even if not fully documented. Nigeria’s Postmaster General and CEO of NIPOST, Tola Odeyemi, has said more than ₦50 billion ($36.5 million) is lost annually to failed or inaccurate deliveries, attributing the losses to the country’s weak addressing system.

But even that figure likely understates the broader consequences, as poor location infrastructure affects far more than logistics.

Banks struggle with customer verification, emergency responders can lose valuable time locating incidents, utilities face challenges identifying service locations, insurers verify claims less efficiently, and governments find it harder to plan and deliver public services.

Successive governments have attempted to modernise Nigeria’s address infrastructure through postal reforms and digital postcode initiatives. Global technology companies have also entered the space. Google Maps has become the country’s dominant navigation platform, while Google’s Plus Codes introduced an alternative way of identifying locations without relying on traditional street addresses.

Yet neither approach has eliminated the everyday friction Nigerians experience when trying to describe where they are. Maps are built around geographic coordinates, but Nigerians often describe places using context that is often local.

Human navigation relies as much on local knowledge as much as it does on geography, creating a gap between how digital maps understand places and how people actually communicate them. Maiaddy believes that gap represents an opportunity.

Building an address layer, not another map

Maimaps launches as three products: a consumer application, a developer API, and software development kits (SDKs) that businesses can integrate directly into their own platforms. The company has spent the past year building the platform while working with prospective customers.

“What makes us different is that we’re not simply building another mapping application. We’re combining modern technologies with mapping infrastructure to create a platform that understands locations the way people actually describe them. We believe solving location identity and intelligence requires more than maps; it requires context, local knowledge, and intelligent interpretation,” Onyejeli noted.

At the centre of the platform is what Maiaddy calls a ‘loccode’. Rather than relying solely on conventional street names — which may be duplicated, unofficial, renamed, or entirely absent — a loccode assigns a persistent digital identifier to a street or notable location. Users can retrieve the loccode for their street through the Maiaddy app and register their individual addresses to it.

According to the company, this makes addresses easier to reference even where formal naming systems are incomplete. Because the identifier remains constant, a location can continue to be recognised even if a street is renamed or administrative boundaries change.

Each street shares a single loccode, while individual registered addresses appear as selectable entries linked to that code. The ambition is to create a standardised layer of location identity that applications and organisations can reference regardless of the quality of existing addressing systems.

Whether users adopt yet another location standard, however, remains the central challenge. History suggests that superior infrastructure alone is rarely enough. Address systems derive their value from network effects. Their usefulness increases only as more businesses, governments, and individuals agree to use them.

Google Maps became dominant not simply because of its technology but because developers, consumers, and enterprises all converged on the same platform. Maiaddy therefore has to convince enough participants to adopt its standard before its benefits become obvious.

Competing with incumbents and government

Maiaddy enters a market where the incumbent is not another startup but Google. Google Maps already serves as the default navigation platform for millions of Nigerians, while Google Plus Codes offer a globally recognised digital addressing alternative.

The federal government has also introduced the Digital Alphanumeric Postcode System as part of broader efforts to modernise postal addressing.

Maiaddy is not necessarily replacing these systems. Instead, it is attempting to sit beneath them as an infrastructure layer tailored to the realities of Nigerian addressing, particularly in communities where conventional addresses remain incomplete or informal.

At launch, Onyejeli says the immediate objective is adoption. The platform is available nationwide, although data quality will naturally vary between regions as mapping coverage expands.

“Mapping is never truly finished; it’s a living system that continuously evolves as new locations are added and data quality improves. Our goal is to keep expanding both coverage and accuracy over time.”

While the consumer application provides the public face of the platform, the larger commercial opportunity lies elsewhere.

If logistics companies can reduce failed deliveries, banks can verify addresses more accurately, real estate companies can standardise property records, and emergency services can locate incidents more quickly, the value of better location infrastructure immediately becomes obvious.

That explains why Maiaddy’s enterprise products — its APIs and SDKs — may ultimately matter more than the consumer app itself.

“Our long-term vision is to become foundational location infrastructure that developers, businesses, governments, and everyday users can all build upon.”

Nigeria has spent decades trying to solve the address problem through public institutions. Maiaddy is betting that the solution may emerge instead from the private sector.

Last updated: July 28, 2026