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 · 143 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 →

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

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

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

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

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

Lidya

Here lies Lidya. For nine years it lent working capital to small businesses across Nigeria and briefly beyond. Then its own books stopped balancing: refunds it could not process, loans it could not recover, founders it could not keep. The last account never settled.

2016 – October 2025Fintech🇳🇬 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

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

Patricia.ng

Here lies Patricia. It made retail crypto and gift-card trading ordinary in Nigeria, then hid a two-million-dollar hack for eighteen months. When it quietly swapped frozen customer balances into a token no one could trade, trust ran out faster than liquidity.

2017 – June 2024Crypto & Web3🇳🇬 Nigeria

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

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

Brass

Here lies Brass. It gave Nigerian businesses current accounts and cash-flow tools, then became the banking equivalent of a merger. Paystack kept the business alive. The Brass name was written off.

2020 – June 2026Fintech🇳🇬 Nigeria

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

OyaPay

Here lies OyaPay. It let offline Nigerian businesses take payments and forward orders, with or without a smartphone. When outside capital was needed, the founder and his sole family investor spent months unable to agree on diluting one stake. The impasse never settled, and in February 2019 he called it quits.

2017 – February 2019Fintech🇳🇬 Nigeria

Ousta

Here lies Ousta. Egypt's first homegrown ride-hailing app, it promised licensed drivers, no surge, and transparent fares, growing fast across five cities. Then Uber and Careem opened a price war it couldn't outbid. Its own fare finally read too high to continue.

2012 – January 2017Travel & Mobility🇪🇬 Egypt

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

WeJapa

Here lies WeJapa. It matched African developers with global employers, the founder screening each application himself. In August 2020 developers went public over pay and treatment, a leadership change followed, but trust never returned. The site quietly went dark by 2021.

2019 – March 2021HR & Talent🇳🇬 Nigeria

Cassbana

Here lies Cassbana. It built financial identities for Egypt's micro-merchants and lent them inventory on the strength of their behaviour. Then its biggest backer withdrew a two-million-dollar promise, the round never closed, and the founders scattered.

2020 – July 2024Fintech🇪🇬 Egypt

Gigbanc

Here lies Gigbanc. It helped Africans get paid globally and withdraw locally, then made one final transfer to the startup afterlife. This transfer is final. Withdrawals are no longer supported.

2023 – July 2026Fintech🇳🇬 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

54 Collective

Here lies 54 Collective. It set out to build 105 startups across all 54 African nations on a philanthropic grant. An unapproved rebrand and commingled charitable funds cost it that grant, and the builder of companies was itself put into liquidation.

2018 – July 2025Fintech🇿🇦 South Africa

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

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

BuyCoins Pro

Here lies BuyCoins Pro. It gave Nigeria's technical traders order books and currency pairs atop the BuyCoins app. But there was never enough volume to fill their orders, and between the central bank's crypto ban and the post-FTX chill, its owner wound the Pro tier down.

2017 – January 2024Crypto & Web3🇳🇬 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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