Interact with and retain your customers conveniently using Termii

Announcing our investment in Termii.

Termii enables businesses to retain customers through personalized messages sent across multiple communication channels.

Team

• Emmanuel Gbolade, CEO and Co-founder. Emmanuel has 5 years of experience in business development, digital marketing, and software development. He has a degree in enterprise management from the Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos and has been instrumental in driving massive growth at companies like heels.com.ng, accounteer.com, and paynergy.ng.
• Tayo Awe, CTO and Co-founder. Tayo has a degree in computer science from the University of Lagos with over 4 years of experience in enterprise software development. He previously worked as a technology consultant at smartfarm.com.ng and paynergy.ng, driving their growth through technology to the tune of over $200,000 in revenue.

Problem

Businesses tend to lose existing customers on a monthly basis because they fail to engage customers uniquely across key communication channels. Personalizing marketing messages solves this problem because it enhances customer engagement and drives repeat purchases. However, there are roadblocks that local companies encounter such as very expensive tariffs when communicating with customers at scale, single channeled platforms, no flexibility to personalize content and poor integration documentation for developers.

Solution

Termii drives customer retention by empowering businesses with affordable tools to personalize their messages across multiple communication channels such as email, SMS, Voice, and WhatsApp. They have built a library of voice, SMS, email & WhatsApp messaging APIs that service providers can integrate into their mobile apps & web platforms to send out personalized notifications at scale to their customers across Africa.

There’s also a web interface that allows digital agencies, regular businesses, and individuals to leverage their messaging tools for their communication needs. Their focus really is to help these service providers interact conveniently with their customers and make sending simple messages like one-time-passwords, payment alerts as well as service notifications at scale effective and affordable using a per-billing system.

Market

What made us excited about the market

According to Deloitte, the African online retail industry is worth over $830B, with Nigeria estimated around $122B. Nigeria, Termii’s primary market houses over 37 million MSMEs with a total contribution to the country’s GDP standing at 48% according to the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics. The African telecoms industry is worth over $65B, with the Nigerian industry estimated at around $9.14B.

For so long the market has focused and built enterprise technology around VAS services ignoring the potentials of email, push notifications and instant messaging distribution. The companies covering these new frontiers are foreign companies whose pricing is too high for local companies to gain access. Now, the African market is evolving and can fend for itself.

Right now, Termii is innovating not just through VAS services like USSD & SMS but also with multichannel voice, instant messaging, push notifications and email technology which previously was a no go area for local companies.

The Team

Why we believe in/backed this team

From our very first interaction about 18 months ago, it was clear that Emmanuel knew exactly the problem he wanted to solve and how to solve it. Before starting Termii, Emmanuel had worked as a digital marketing consultant for several companies.

Most of his clients at the time consistently faced the need to automate their customer’s sales journey using email automation tools. However, this was not very effective with local customers for reasons such as low internet penetration and cultural behaviors in some regions.

“What struck me the most at the earliest stages of my interactions with Emmanuel was his willingness to keep us updated on Termii’s progress, his constant requests for the right guidance as he built out the company and access to more business network in order to increase their market share. He is the type of founder you want to partner with.” — Dayo Koleowo

Meeting Tayo, his co-founder, in 2015, was pivotal. They started pursuing the idea of a multi-channel based platform for communicating with customers that will be usable by both developers and digital marketers.

Emmanuel’s experience working with digital marketers and understanding the space combined with Tayo’s technical experience in building tech solutions was a perfect mix that we couldn’t resist. More importantly, beyond just having the ability to build the product, they were actually executing.

Traction

We have indeed watched Termii grow from a few customers using the product to hundreds of customers paying to use the product as of today and from hundreds of dollars monthly to thousands of dollars every month in revenue.

The impressive part about their traction has been the consistent growth despite having to iterate over and over without losing sight of the ultimate goal — helping businesses, individuals and big organizations to interact with and retain their customers conveniently.

Conclusion

One thing the Termii team has done really well is to focus on building out their product and talking to their users constantly which has, in turn, increased their growth via word of mouth and referrals.

We are excited about what the Termii team is building and we believe they are capable of achieving their ultimate goal not just in Nigeria but in Africa too.

Get in touch with Termii today.

At Microtraction, our long term mission is to accelerate Africa’s transition to a sustainable and developed economy. We do this by investing in entrepreneurs who leverage technology, capital, and innovation to try and solve some of the largest problems on the continent. If you are working on solving one of these problems, we should talk!

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