Nigerian startup GreenBii, spun out of ed-tech platform Traindemy, is helping African businesses manage all their operations and data from one digital space.
Launched by the team at Traindemy, which gives people access to online courses provided by vocational and technical schools to help them acquire in-demand skills, GreenBii was launched to help businesses overcome the “chaos” of digitising their operations and data.
“During our work on Traindemy we realised that our contacts and files were all over the place, and we had shared usernames and passwords to the different websites we used for marketing, communications and HR,” said Vincent Edigin, the co-founder and CEO of both startups.
“One day someone did something in the backend access where we manage site content and customer data. It was a costly mistake.”
Something needed to be done, but Traindemy was focused on the job at hand. After building two more bits of software for educators, the team decided it would be good if users could use their Traindemy login to access all products.
“We set out to build an all-in-one ed-tech suite, but then the market demanded we extend our reach to solve similar problems in other sectors. That was when GreenBii was formed,” said Edigin.
As many businesses digitise their operations and data, they find themselves “creating a new chaos”, with multiple accounts and struggling to make sense out of the individual analytics from each software.
“What if they had one admin account with a super dashboard that helps them monitor all the activities of their business, and a way to create new logins for employees and assign them access to all softwares, like marketing, payroll, HR, or accounting etc, according to their job functions? And as soon as an employee leaves, access is retrieved. What if they had their contacts and files in one place and were able to connect their Google Drive or Dropbox accounts too. We did surveys and 40 businesses out of 120 sampled signed up as private testers,” Edigin said.
GreenBii now has 200 paying customers, with 700 more on its waiting list. Monthly recurring revenue is US$3,500 and growing, and the mainly bootstrapped startup is now in the process of raising a US$200,000 pre-seed round of funding. Edigin hopes to expand GreenBii into South Africa and Ghana fairly quickly.
With all this growth happening at GreenBii, what now for Traindemy? Edigin said the team remains equally focused on its ed-tech play, which will shortly rebrand as TVET Labs, an on-site cohort-based vocational school with some online resources for registered students.
“We plan to sell what we built during our run as SaaS on GreenBii’s app market. This is already in progress and we have seen educators and school owners subscribe for an entire education suite through GreenBii,” he said.
