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 Shutdowns · 142 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 →

Showroom.ng

Here lies Showroom.ng. It connected Nigerian furniture makers with buyers for a commission. A seven-figure seed came in, but a thin team and slow execution undid it in under two years. The pieces never fit together.

2014 – August 2016E-commerce & Retail🇳🇬 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

Zumi

Here lies Zumi. Once a women's magazine, reborn as a B2B apparel marketplace, it moved twenty million dollars of clothing for five thousand retailers. But the unit economics never quite fit, funding dried up, and Zumi closed for the second and final time.

2016 – March 2023E-commerce & Retail🇰🇪 Kenya

RejaReja

Here lies RejaReja. It handed informal retailers wholesale goods and next-day delivery across five countries, moving nearly 160 million dollars in trade. Thin margins, price wars, and a funding round that never fully landed left it unable to restock its own runway.

2020 – April 2024E-commerce & Retail🇰🇪 Kenya

Lazerpay

Here lies Lazerpay. It let over three thousand businesses accept crypto and stablecoin payments across Africa. But the bear market froze its next round; layoffs came first, then the full stop, and merchants were told to withdraw their funds before the gateway closed.

2021 – April 2023Crypto & Web3🇳🇬 Nigeria

Mxit

Here lies Mxit. Born in 2005 as an SMS game, it became the chat app of a South African generation, 7.5 million strong at its peak. Then smartphones arrived without a Mxit worth opening, users left for WhatsApp, and it sent its last message in 2016.

2005 – October 2021Communication & Social🇿🇦 South Africa

Mobidoc

Here lies Mobidoc. It offered Nigerians remote consultations, medical records, and digital prescriptions from a phone. But patients kept choosing the clinic waiting room, and no amount of connectivity could convince them to pay. The doctor was in; the patients were not.

2016 – February 2019Health Tech🇳🇬 Nigeria

La Reina

Here lies La Reina. It let women across Cairo rent and lend evening and bridal gowns, matching designer supply with demand. Around 2022 the site and its accounts quietly went dark. The dresses were returned, but never re-listed, and no closing notice was ever posted.

2022 – February 2023E-commerce & Retail🇪🇬 Egypt

Mocality

Here lies Mocality. Backed by Naspers, it paid agents to build a free business directory across Kenya and Nigeria. The directory grew past 170,000 listings but the revenue never did, and the owner switched both markets off on one day. No entry could list its own future.

2009 – February 2013Marketing & CRM🇰🇪 Kenya,🇳🇬 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

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

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

Tulaa

Here lies Tulaa. It connected Kenyan smallholder farmers to input financing and buyers for their harvest through mobile tools and agent networks. After its 2018 seed round the updates stopped, the site and accounts went quiet, and no closing word was ever given.

2016 – October 2019Fintech🇰🇪 Kenya

Pillow

Here lies Pillow in Nigeria and Ghana. It offered a place to save, spend, and invest in crypto against inflation, and drew seventy-five thousand users in a year. Then the regulatory climate shifted the ground beneath its infrastructure, withdrawals were suspended, and the app was pulled.

2022 – July 2023Crypto & Web3🇳🇬 Nigeria,🇬🇭 Ghana

Lipa Later

Here lies Lipa Later. It let Kenyans buy now and pay later, then bought an e-commerce platform to grow faster. Unpaid staff, chasing suppliers and a lost court case caught up first. For its own bills, later never came.

2018 – March 2025E-commerce & Retail🇰🇪 Kenya

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

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

Vibra

Here lies Vibra. It set out to bring peer-to-peer crypto trading to Africans through verified merchants and paid tutors. But users couldn't clear KYC or get their withdrawals out, and the $400-a-class tutor scheme cost more than it returned. Nigeria logged off first.

2021 – October 2023Crypto & Web3🇳🇬 Nigeria

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

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

Collect Africa

Here lies Collect Africa. For four years it let Nigerian SMEs collect payments across transfers, POS, QR codes and links from one dashboard. Its founders found a bigger bet in stablecoins and closed it on purpose, redirecting every hand to Autospend.

2021 – August 2025Fintech🇳🇬 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

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

Quizac

Here lies Quizac. It turned studying into a game for more than 12,000 learners across many subjects. Individual players never paid enough to win, and the funding to chase profitable corporate clients never came. Tekedia Capital claimed the high score a week later.

2019 – August 2024EdTech🇳🇬 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.

Know a product that didn't make it?

Help us give it a proper burial. Submit a shutdown and our researchers will verify it before it's laid to rest.

Submit a Shutdown