Lipana

Lipana is a Nairobi-built software suite for small and medium businesses in Kenya. Rather than one giant platform, it ships ten focused apps - point of sale, restaurant ordering, online payments, rent, bookings, appointments, events, payroll, expenses, eSign and accounting - each of which works on its own subdomain and can be adopted separately. The unifying idea is that a typical Kenyan business currently runs on a till, a phone full of M-Pesa messages, a stock book and a payroll spreadsheet, and Lipana replaces them one at a time.

Local rails are baked in rather than bolted on. M-Pesa prompts reconcile against sales automatically, online payments run through STK Push and webhooks, and the AI payroll agent calculates PAYE, SHIF, NSSF and the Housing Levy while watching KRA deadlines. The point of sale keeps selling when the network drops, and event check-in keeps scanning without signal. eSign lets contracts be signed from a WhatsApp link, and the accounting app imports M-Pesa and bank statements to produce VAT3-ready books.

Layer on top of that is a growing set of AI agents that do the work and ask for approval. Payroll is the first: you describe a change in plain words, it prepares the run and waits for your yes. The company says POS insights and AI contract drafting are already live, with more agents planned based on what owners say takes up their evenings.