adsCossi Achille Arouko and Samy Chiba co-founded Bujeti in 2022 with a single thesis: that African businesses were being underserved not at the payment layer, but at the control layer: the infrastructure that governs how money moves before and after it leaves an account. Three years and several product launches later, the Y Combinator-backed platform has added payroll to a suite that already covers corporate cards, expense management, vendor payments, tax management, and multi-currency operations.
We spoke to both founders about what payroll reveals about the problem Bujeti is actually solving, and what it takes to build a Finance Control Centre from scratch on a continent where the infrastructure is still catching up.
Payroll feels like an obvious category for a platform like Bujeti. Why did it take until now?
Arouko: Nothing about building this has been obvious from the inside. When we started, the most pressing thing was giving businesses visibility and control over spending: cards, budgets, approvals. That was the hole. We filled it. Then it became clear that payments were broken: vendors being paid via WhatsApp instructions, no audit trail, no approval workflow. We built that. Then tax became urgent, especially with everything happening with FIRS and the 2025 Tax Act. We built the Tax Vault. Each product has come because we watched businesses hit a specific wall.
