Ask Francis Osifo, co-founder and chief executive officer of Rayda, a fixed-asset and information technology (IT) device lifecycle management platform, where the company began, and he will tell you a story about a laptop.
Osifo was chief technology officer and a co-founder at 54gene, the genomics startup that would later shut down in 2023. The company had hired an employee in Kenya and needed to ship a laptop from Nigeria, he recalled. The device eventually spent nearly two months stuck in customs, and clearing it had become an expensive ordeal for 54gene.
However, the problem that he noticed was bigger than one laptop. He explained that he had no reliable way of knowing what assets 54gene owned. The company’s finance records could show the value of its fixed assets, but they could not tell which employee currently had which company-issued device or whether it had been repaired or reassigned to someone else. As 54gene grew past 200 employees, that knowledge gap had started looking like a structural blind spot.
“I kept going into that rabbit hole of the different parts of the problem, whether it is visibility around the data tracking, the depreciation of the value of those assets over time, or even being able to deal with that entire journey from an employee joining a company to an employee leaving the company,” he told TechCabal in an interview on Tuesday.
