Built for Africa. Now Dead.

A minute of silence to the African software products that are no longer operating. Learn what they built, what led to their closure, and which alternatives continue to serve their users today.

African Software Products That Have Shut Down · 117 products

The Graveyard is an editorial archive. Each fate describes what happened to a product as an independent service, while the record separates documented facts from community opinion. How the Graveyard works →

aptLearn

Here lies aptLearn. It made tech education accessible to 200,000 learners, but free users and paid subscriptions never graduated together. The platform closed its final lesson and left an AI pivot as homework.

2022 – UnknownEdTech🇳🇬 Nigeria

Awa Bike

Here lies Awa Bike. It parked shared bicycles on Nigerian campuses and estates for on-demand rides. But strikes kept shuttering the universities it leaned on, the cities had no bike lanes, and theft and repairs wore the thin margins flat. The wheels stopped turning.

2017 – August 2023Travel & Mobility🇳🇬 Nigeria

Baia Group

Here lies Baia. It turned informal cash supply chains into a messaging-based ledger for micro-merchants and their suppliers. The ledger balanced everyone's books but its own; shareholders swapped their equity for warrants and the venture was folded into a holding company.

2019 – December 2023E-commerce & Retail🇰🇪 Kenya

Barter by Flutterwave

Here lies Barter. For seven years it gave Nigerians virtual dollar cards for Netflix, subscriptions, and shopping the world. When card-partner troubles and merchant rejections piled up and it fell to one percent of Flutterwave's volume, the parent cancelled the card.

2017 – March 2024Fintech🇳🇬 Nigeria

Bento Africa

Here lies Bento Africa. It ran payroll, tax and pensions for African companies from one platform. Then it could not make its own payroll: engineers walked out unpaid, the CEO resigned, and the deductions it was trusted to remit went missing.

2017 – February 2025Fintech🇳🇬 Nigeria

Bizao

Here lies Bizao. Its APIs let companies accept mobile money and cards across a dozen African markets, up to 350 million requests a month. Six years of volume never turned into profit, and a Paris court called the final settlement.

2019 – April 2025Fintech🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire

Brimore

Here lies Brimore. It linked Egyptian manufacturers to an army of freelance sales agents reaching all 27 governorates. Fierce competition and a valuation cut slowed the network, and by 2024 its operations sat paused while the remaining founders weighed a return.

2017 – February 2023E-commerce & Retail🇪🇬 Egypt

Bundle Africa

Here lies Bundle Africa's exchange. For three years it let Africans send, save, and trade cash and crypto, moving some fifty million dollars a month. As the continent's crypto market cooled, it closed the trading floor and moved its people to Cashlink. The rails remain.

2021 – July 2023Crypto & Web3🇳🇬 Nigeria

Capiter

Here lies Capiter. It connected Egypt's retailers and wholesalers to digitise the wholesale trade. Aggressive hiring emptied the shelves of cash, and when the board removed its founders amid fraud claims, no merger could restock it. The marketplace was liquidated.

2020 – August 2023E-commerce & Retail🇪🇬 Egypt

Chopnownow

Here lies ChopNowNow. Its Lagos dark kitchen grew fast on free delivery and a comedian's endorsement. But 19.5 percent food inflation and thirty-percent margins left no room, and the moment delivery stopped being free, customers took their appetite elsewhere. The founder now packs groceries as ShopNowNow.

2020 – February 2024E-commerce & Retail🇳🇬 Nigeria

DealDey

Here lies DealDey. It brought Nigerians daily discounts on goods, services, and event tickets, once among the country's largest online sellers. After the acquisition it went quiet on merchants and customers alike, and the deals finally ran out. The last offer went unclaimed.

2011 – January 2019E-commerce & Retail🇳🇬 Nigeria

Edukoya

Here lies Edukoya. It taught 80,000 students with live online classes on a record edtech pre-seed round. But families short on devices, data and disposable income never became paying scale. The final bell rang, and it returned what capital was left.

2021 – February 2025EdTech🇳🇬 Nigeria

Freshbag

Here lies Freshbag. It linked Cameroon's smallholder farmers straight to Yaoundé's street vendors, cutting out the middlemen. The vendors, it turned out, preferred the informal handshake to a digital contract, and the produce kept moving faster than the payments.

2019 – August 2024Logistics & Supply Chain🇨🇲 Cameroon

GoldenEye (Aerospace and Defense)

Here lies GoldenEye (Aerospace and Defense). In stealth, it built precision drones for humanitarian and defence work across Africa. Steep defence-procurement barriers and scarce follow-on capital kept it grounded, and it wound down in early 2022 as quietly as it had operated. No launch was ever announced.

2018 – January 2022Logistics & Supply Chain🇬🇭 Ghana

GoMyWay

Here lies GoMyWay. It offered Nigerians affordable carpooling and later interstate rides, run for two years on pre-seed money. But riders and drivers simply paid each other offline after matching, so the platform earned nothing. Everyone got where they were going except the business.

2015 – October 2017Media & Entertainment🇳🇬 Nigeria

Gro Intelligence

Here lies Gro Intelligence. It gathered the world's agricultural data to help governments and giants like Unilever see climate risk coming, and sat on a hundred-million-dollar war chest. Its bespoke, consulting-style product never became something many could buy, and the forecasts could not predict its own collapse.

2012 – May 2024AI & Analytics🇰🇪 Kenya

Heroshe

Here lies Heroshe. It shipped goods from US, UK and China warehouses home to 40,000 Nigerians. Then a rushed warehouse move left parcels sorted by no one and delivered on no schedule, and months of backlog broke the trust it took years to build.

2019 – May 2025E-commerce & Retail🇳🇬 Nigeria

HerRyde

Here lies HerRyde. It gave Nigerian women a ride-hailing service with women behind every wheel, answering real fears about safety, and it moved over two thousand of them. Bootstrapped to the end, it could not raise the fare to scale, and parked itself in hibernation.

2022 – May 2024Travel & Mobility🇳🇬 Nigeria

Hytch

Here lies Hytch. It launched to cut ride-hailing costs through carpooling, drew six hundred users in a week, then pivoted to delivering for small businesses. But it ran on friends-and-family money and undercut prices it couldn't afford; nine months in, the ride ended.

2021 – February 2023Logistics & Supply Chain🇳🇬 Nigeria

Inseco

Here lies Inseco. It ran Africa's largest Black Soldier Fly farm, turning waste into protein in Cape Town. Then the grid kept failing, and larvae that needed steady warmth could not survive the dark. The colony went cold.

2017 – October 2025🇿🇦 South Africa

iProcure

Here lies iProcure. It moved farm inputs and software to distributors serving nearly a million Kenyan farmers. Behind the scale sat a burn rate its cashflow could not cover, and when no fresh capital came, the accounts ran dry and the administrators moved in.

2012 – April 2024Logistics & Supply Chain🇰🇪 Kenya

iROKOtv

Here lies iROKOtv. It streamed Nollywood to the world and chased the title of Africa's own Netflix for over a decade. More than $100 million later, the subscription never scaled against global players. The studio made money; the stream ran dry.

2011 – June 2025Media & Entertainment🇳🇬 Nigeria

Joovlin

Here lies Joovlin. It gave Nigeria's micro-sellers one place to take social-media orders and manage their stock. Two thousand resellers and six thousand products never added up to real revenue, and no follow-on funding arrived. The order was never fulfilled.

2020 – December 2024E-commerce & Retail🇳🇬 Nigeria

Jumia Food

Here lies Jumia Food. For a decade it carried meals to doorsteps across seven African markets, until its parent chose profit over the round trip. The delivery was cancelled mid-route, and riders were left with earnings the app would no longer release.

2013 – December 2023E-commerce & Retail🇳🇬 Nigeria
About the archive

How the Graveyard works

The Graveyard is an editorial archive. Each fate describes what happened to a product as an independent service, while the record separates documented facts from community opinion.

Read our editorial standards →

What belongs here

Products that shut down, were deliberately sunset, were absorbed into another company or brand, or are confirmed dormant.

How records are verified

We review company announcements, founder statements, credible reporting, archived pages, and other public evidence.

What each record explains

Complete records document the timeline, outcome, contributing causes, lessons, cited sources, and active alternatives where available.

Frequently asked questions about the Liners Startups Graveyard.

The Liners Graveyard is a documented archive of African software products that no longer operate as independent products. Each complete record explains when the product operated, how it ended, what contributed to the outcome, and which alternatives remain active.

A product may be included when it has shut down, been discontinued by its owner, been absorbed into another company or brand, or remained dormant long enough that it no longer appears to operate. We distinguish those outcomes on each record rather than calling every case a failure.

We review official company announcements, founder statements, credible reporting, archived pages, and other public evidence. Available citations are listed in the Sources section of the product record, and records can be corrected as better evidence emerges.

Shut down means the product's operations ended. Sunset means its owner deliberately discontinued it. Absorbed means it stopped operating independently after a rebrand, merger, or acquisition. Dormant means there are strong signs that the product is inactive, but no definitive closure announcement.

Surviving alternatives are active products with meaningful overlap in category, features, markets, and use case. They use the same alternatives method as the rest of Liners, and placement is not sold.

Yes. Use the Suggest a correction action on the product page to tell us what needs to change and include a supporting source where possible. Our researchers review corrections before updating a record.

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