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 →

Snapt

Here lies Snapt. It built software load balancers and application delivery controllers for enterprises. Demand kept climbing, but no round followed the 2018 Series A, and the company that balanced everyone else's traffic had no failover of its own. It shut off in October 2022.

2012 – October 2022Cybersecurity🇿🇦 South Africa

Spinlet

Here lies Spinlet. Built in Finland, revived by Nigerian investors, it aimed to be Africa's first music streaming service. Two million downloads never became paying subscribers, as clumsy card payments and Spotify's arrival closed in. The track ended before the royalties arrived.

2006 – January 2016Media & Entertainment🇳🇬 Nigeria

TalentBase

Here lies TalentBase. It ran payroll, leave and performance for Nigerian businesses from the cloud, and made its founder an HR-tech name. As she moved on to other ventures, scaling strain and stiff competition wore it down, and it slipped off the radar into stealth and then silence.

2016 – May 2021HR & Talent🇳🇬 Nigeria

TiketMobile

Here lies TiketMobile. It let Nigerians find and buy interstate bus tickets by phone, launched on a small Tony Elumelu grant. The grant ran short, rivals took the routes, and an airport e-hailing pivot couldn't revive it. It booked a one-way ticket.

2013 – January 2016Travel & Mobility🇳🇬 Nigeria

TradeHub

Here lies TradeHub. It set out to digitise procurement for Egypt's manufacturers, then pivoted to sales-automation software when the marketplace stalled. Neither found buyers with conviction. Eighteen months in, it returned what capital remained and closed the order book.

2023 – September 2025E-commerce & Retail🇪🇬 Egypt

Tress

Here lies Tress. It helped Black women find hairstyles, stylists and products, and grew a warm community across Ghana and beyond. Press and a brand partnership arrived, but funding and fit did not follow. In May 2018 the app went offline and its founders quietly moved on.

2014 – September 2019Communication & Social🇬🇭 Ghana

VMedKit

Here lies VMedKit. It brought VR exposure therapy to Nigerian clinics, treating PTSD, phobias and anxiety on Oculus headsets. Costly hardware, a shortage of localized 3D content, and slow uptake among VR-trained clinicians held it back, and after its 2019 high point it faded from view.

2018 – June 2021Health Tech🇳🇬 Nigeria

Wala

Here lies Wala. Its Dala token let unbanked users in South Africa and Uganda send money by phone, 150,000 of them within months. But cash-in rails kept failing, scammers gamed the rewards, and eight months pitching 100 investors through crypto winter raised nothing. It switched off in June 2019.

2017 – July 2019Crypto & Web3🇿🇦 South Africa

WeFarm Shop

Here lies WeFarm Shop. Bolted onto WeFarm's farmer knowledge network, it let smallholders buy agricultural supplies online. About a year in, difficult market conditions made the shop hard to scale, and its owner pulled it. The advice-sharing platform it grew from stayed open.

2014 – July 2022E-commerce & Retail🇰🇪 Kenya

WhereIsMyTransport

Here lies WhereIsMyTransport. It mapped the formal and informal transit of fifty cities and sold the data to governments and the World Bank. It could chart a route through any city, but not to its next funding round. In late 2023 it stopped.

2016 – October 2023AI & Analytics🇿🇦 South Africa

YallaXash

Here lies YallaXash. It sent money from Canada's diaspora to Morocco and West Africa across 12,000 payout points. It expanded fast on far too little capital against far richer rivals, and filed for bankruptcy owing $1.2 million it could not pay out.

2018 – March 2025Fintech🇲🇦 Morocco

Zarttech

Here lies Zarttech. It connected African tech talent with global companies and promised to close Europe's hiring gap. Then its own payroll developed a critical outage. The apology shipped, but the missing salaries never made production.

2020 – March 2026HR & Talent🇳🇬 Nigeria

Zazuu

Here lies Zazuu. It gathered seventeen remittance providers so Africans abroad could compare rates and send money home for less. It found the cheapest transfer for everyone except itself; with no follow-on round, the marketplace closed with £3,300 to its name.

2018 – November 2023Fintech🇳🇬 Nigeria

Zenafri

Here lies Zenafri. It taught African children literacy, numeracy, and their own languages through apps and animation, and collected awards for the effort. But too few would pay, and Nigeria's 2024 currency crisis drained the runway before the lesson could fund itself.

2016 – August 2024EdTech🇳🇬 Nigeria

Cova

Here lies Cova. It gathered every account, investment, and coin into one dashboard for a person's money. But few wanted to plan for passing assets on after death — the very use case it was built for — and traction stayed thin. Its founders stopped with runway to spare.

2021 – January 2024Fintech🇨🇲 Cameroon

Chimoney

Here lies Chimoney. Its API moved value across currencies, ledgers, and borders. The technology could route payments almost anywhere, but distribution never found the address and runway returned insufficient funds.

2022 – May 2026Fintech🇳🇬 Nigeria

Thepeer

Here lies Thepeer. It built the pipes to move money wallet-to-wallet across hundreds of African fintechs, and for a while the volumes climbed fast. Compliance blocked the wallets it needed, adoption came slower than the pitch, and the connection quietly dropped.

2021 – April 2024Developer Tools & Cloud🇳🇬 Nigeria

Fluidcoins

Here lies Fluidcoins. It built crypto payment rails for African businesses through Flip and Fluidshop, letting them hold stablecoins and accept payments. When the 2022 bear market froze follow-on funding, eighteen months of runway ran dry and the whole company transferred to Blockfinex to keep the lights on.

2021 – February 2023Crypto & Web3🇳🇬 Nigeria

Livestock Wealth

Here lies Livestock Wealth. It let South Africans invest in cattle, crops, and macadamia trees. The assets could grow on trees or walk on four legs. Liquidity, unfortunately, did neither.

2015 – May 2026Agri Tech🇿🇦 South Africa

FoodCourt

Here lies FoodCourt. It put several virtual restaurants in one basket and delivered more than a million meals. Then salaries, vendor bills, and kitchen economics arrived at the same table. The last order was a shutdown, with no rider assigned.

2021 – April 2026Quick Commerce🇳🇬 Nigeria

Float

Here lies Float. It promised to close the cash-flow gap for African SMBs, then quietly gambled client deposits on black-market naira-to-USDT trades. A broker vanished with a million dollars, the naira sank, and the liquidity company ran dry. Six million in client funds stayed frozen.

2020 – September 2023Fintech🇿🇦 South Africa
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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