Serlzo is positioning itself at the intersection of artificial intelligence, sales and marketing automation, with a focus on creators and digital businesses across Africa and other emerging markets.
For years, digital businesses have added new tools as they grow. One platform manages emails, another handles payments, while WhatsApp serves as the sales desk. At the same time, customer information sits elsewhere, with courses and communities often running on entirely different platforms.
Individually, those tools can work well, but the difficulty begins when a business needs them to work together.
A prospective customer may discover a creator on Instagram, ask a question on WhatsApp, visit a landing page, abandon checkout and disappear without another follow-up. A previous customer may be interested in another product, but the business has no simple way to identify that opportunity.
As a result, customer data becomes fragmented, marketing becomes harder to coordinate and creators and Digital business owners spend increasing amounts of time operating software instead of growing their businesses. Serlzo is building around that problem.
The company, founded by Joshua Mba and product designer Richmond Ohalewe, brings sales, marketing, customer management and automation into one system for creators and digital businesses, particularly those operating in Africa and other emerging markets.
At the centre of the platform is Sio, Serlzo’s AI agent, which adds an intelligence layer to the company’s sales and marketing infrastructure.
For Serlzo, the opportunity goes beyond adding artificial intelligence to existing software. The company wants to establish a new category from Africa: Marketing AI.
Africa’s creator economy is growing, but its business infrastructure remains fragmented
Africa’s creator economy is becoming a significant commercial market. Recent estimates place its value between roughly $3 billion in 2023 and $5.1 billion in 2025, while projections suggest the market could approach $17.8 billion by 2030.
Yet the revenue generated by individual creators tells a different story. The 2026 Africa Creator Economy Report found that about 60% of active African creators earn less than $100 per month.
The gap is not simply about audience size. Across Africa, creators are launching courses, communities, consulting services, digital products and other businesses around their expertise.
Digital businesses are also becoming more sophisticated in how they acquire customers and distribute products. However, turning that activity into consistent revenue remains a challenge, especially when the tools they rely on are not connected.
In many cases, sales conversations happen on WhatsApp, leads are kept in spreadsheets, email campaigns run on separate platforms, while payments are processed elsewhere. Courses and communities may also require additional tools, making it difficult to manage the entire customer journey in one place.
As those businesses grow, the fragmentation becomes more expensive, with missed leads, delayed follow-ups and previous buyers who are easily forgotten.
Customer information also becomes difficult to connect, leaving founders with limited visibility into where potential revenue is being lost. This is the gap Serlzo is addressing through a platform that connects sales, marketing, CRM, automation, customer communication, payments and digital product delivery.
Sio, meanwhile, is designed to help businesses interpret what is happening across those activities and take action faster.
Serlzo’s proposition is that creators and digital businesses should be able to run sophisticated sales and marketing operations without assembling a complicated stack of disconnected software.
Joshua’s journey into the problem started long before the AI boom
Joshua has been selling digital products online since 2016. Before Serlzo, he ran a digital marketing consultancy and agency, giving him direct experience with customer acquisition, offers, funnels, advertising and conversion.
He later helped build and led growth at Stakecut, a digital product distribution platform that grew from zero to more than 500,000 users and processed more than $2 million in transaction volume.
That experience shaped his understanding of what happens after a business attracts attention. Getting more people into a sales funnel was only part of the work.
Businesses also needed to know which prospects were interested, who required follow-up, why customers were dropping out of the buying process and what existing buyers were likely to purchase next.
Joshua’s background as a Product Engineer added another perspective, as many of the sales and marketing problems he encountered were also systems problems.
Customer interactions could be connected, repetitive processes could be automated and data could be used to improve decisions.
Artificial intelligence introduced another possibility: the system itself could begin understanding what was happening across the business and help determine what action to take next. That thinking became central to the development of Serlzo.
Building around how digital businesses actually sell
Serlzo begins with the customer journey. A business captures a lead. That lead may receive an email, continue the conversation on WhatsApp, purchase a product, join a course or community and later receive another offer.
Rather than treating those interactions as separate software categories, Serlzo connects them around the same customer relationship.
Its platform brings together landing pages, forms, CRM, email, WhatsApp, SMS, payments, checkout, courses, communities and automation in one environment.
That structure is relevant in African and emerging markets, where sales frequently move between multiple channels. WhatsApp, for example, is often more than a messaging application for a small business.
It functions as a sales channel, customer service delivery and relationship management tool.
For Serlzo, the important part is not merely connecting WhatsApp but connecting what happens on WhatsApp to everything else the business knows about that customer.
A prospect asking about pricing may already have visited a landing page, opened an email and started a checkout.
When those activities exist inside the same system, the business gains context, and that context also makes AI more useful.
Sio moves Serlzo from automation towards Marketing AI
Much of the current AI marketing market focuses on content generation, including writing emails, producing advertising copy, generating headlines and creating social media posts.
Sio, however, is designed to work across a broader part of the business.
The AI agent operates within Serlzo’s sales and marketing environment, giving it access to the context required to help businesses understand customers, identify opportunities and take action.
That allows Serlzo to help businesses understand what is happening in their operations, determine what steps to take next and receive assistance in carrying out those actions.
For example, a creator who generates hundreds of leads for a course may convert only a small percentage into customers. The problem is not necessarily generating another marketing message.
The creator needs to understand where prospects are dropping off, which requires connecting information across campaigns, customer activity, conversations and purchases.
Sio is designed to help bring that information together, allowing the creator to ask a more operational question: “Show me the people who asked about the price but have not purchased and help me follow up with them.”
This illustrates the distinction Serlzo is making between adding AI features to marketing software and building Marketing AI.
In its approach, the intelligence is connected to the business itself, extending beyond content creation to understanding customer activity and supporting sales decisions.
Making sophisticated sales operations accessible to smaller businesses
Large companies typically build growth operations using teams of specialists. They have marketers, salespeople, customer relationship managers, analysts, copywriters, automation specialists, support teams and agencies.
Creators and smaller digital businesses often want many of the same outcomes without having the same operational capacity.
Joshua sees artificial intelligence as a way to narrow that gap.
“The internet made distribution global, and payments made it easier for businesses to collect money globally. We believe AI can make sophisticated business operations global too,” Joshua says.
That idea forms part of Serlzo’s wider vision, which centres on reducing the technical knowledge required to manage sales and marketing operations.
A business owner should not need to understand every CRM field, automation rule or marketing workflow before running an effective sales operation.
Instead, Serlzo aims to translate more of that complexity into actions that are easier for the business owner to understand and execute.
A creator launching a programme, for example, can use Serlzo to build the offer, capture prospects, communicate through email or WhatsApp, collect payment, deliver the product and continue managing the customer relationship after the first transaction.
Sio adds intelligence across that process. The intended result is a system that reduces how much software expertise an entrepreneur needs, instead of simply introducing more software for the entrepreneur to operate.
How Richmond Ohalewe made that complexity usable
Building a system capable of doing all of that created another problem: complexity. A platform connecting CRM, marketing, sales, commerce, messaging and automation could easily become software only experienced marketers understood.
Solving that has been the work of Chiemezie Richmond Ohalewe, Serlzo’s co-founder, who leads product and design across the platform. Richmond has more than seven years of experience designing SaaS, web3, learning and real estate products, including roles at Genesys Tech Hub, Check and The Thunderclap, where he worked with clients such as Factors AI.
In his role at Serlzo, he directed the integration of essential components including Workflow, Broadcast, Storefront, and the automated WhatsApp assistant, unifying them around a cohesive customer journey instead of relying on disconnected applications. This methodology proved particularly vital in redesigning automation capabilities.
While traditional workflow platforms require an understanding of complex logic, triggers, and parameters, Richmond focused on creating an intuitive, visual experience.
This allows entrepreneurs to design and deploy comprehensive customer journeys without needing technical skills, ultimately decreasing setup time for automated sequences by 70%.
Richmond also led the design of Sio, the AI agent built natively into Serlzo, turning its capabilities into an experience any business owner can use. Sio supercharges creators’ productivity while making the experience of running their business feel more personal and more their own.
“For years, software adoption in Africa meant asking business owners to adapt to tools designed for other markets. AI is changing that,” he says. “When a creator can simply tell Sio what they want, the software adapts to them, and that’s what lets us build for African realities.”
The two founders bring complementary experience to Serlzo’s development. Joshua’s background spans digital products, marketing, growth and engineering, while Richmond brings product and design experience focused on reducing complexity for users.
Together, they are building Serlzo around the idea that sophisticated business infrastructure should not require a sophisticated internal team to operate.
Serlzo is entering a crowded global market
The company is not entering an empty category. HubSpot, Mailchimp, GoHighLevel and several newer AI companies already operate across parts of CRM, marketing automation, sales software and customer intelligence.
Serlzo’s proposed differentiation lies in the businesses it is building for. Creators and digital businesses across Africa and emerging markets often operate differently from traditional companies.
The founder may also be the marketer, WhatsApp may be one of the company’s most important sales channels, and a small team may manage customer acquisition, sales, support and product delivery at the same time.
In fact, most creators are solo founders in Africa who want fast execution time and delivery
Serlzo’s approach is to bring those activities into a single environment and apply AI intelligence across them. The company is building from African market realities, although its ambition extends beyond the continent.
Similar challenges exist across emerging markets where entrepreneurs are building digital businesses faster than they can build the operational teams needed to support them.
This gives Serlzo a potential market beyond its initial African focus, even as it competes with established global software providers.
Getting started with Serlzo today
Serlzo is already available to creators and digital businesses looking to consolidate their sales and marketing operations.
Businesses can use the platform to create pages, capture leads, maintain customer information, communicate through multiple channels, automate customer journeys, collect payments, sell products, deliver courses and manage communities.
A business does not need to migrate every part of its operation immediately. It can start with a single customer journey, such as an Instagram advert leading to a landing page, followed by lead capture, WhatsApp or email follow-up, checkout and product delivery.
Instead of managing each stage across separate systems, the business can run the journey inside Serlzo and keep the customer relationship connected throughout.
Sio adds an intelligence layer intended to help the business understand what is happening across that journey, identify opportunities and move prospects towards a sale faster.
The opportunity Serlzo sees is larger than replacing individual software subscriptions. Creators and digital businesses are becoming more sophisticated, but many still operate with fragmented sales and marketing systems.
That fragmentation creates a gap between having an audience and running a scalable business.
Serlzo is building for that gap through a platform that provides the operational layer for sales, marketing, customer relationships and automation, while Sio brings AI intelligence across those operations.
For Joshua and Richmond, the goal is to make advanced sales and marketing capabilities more accessible to the businesses driving Africa’s digital economy.
The company’s central proposition is that a creator or digital business should not need a large marketing team, several disconnected platforms and deep technical expertise to understand customers and grow revenue.
Serlzo’s approach brings those operations together and uses AI to make them easier to understand and act on.
As Africa’s creator economy and digital business ecosystem continue to expand, the companies that solve the infrastructure behind monetisation may become just as important as the platforms that created the audiences in the first place.
Serlzo is positioning itself in that layer by combining sales and marketing infrastructure, AI intelligence through Sio, and creator growth initiatives such as the Serlzo Money Club.
The broader goal is to help creators and digital businesses do more than simply launch online. It is to help them build businesses that sell consistently, grow intelligently and receive recognition for the milestones they achieve along the way.
Serlzo is building a Marketing AI company from Africa, helping creators and digital businesses sell faster, understand their customers better and grow into sustainable businesses.
Supporting creators beyond the software
Serlzo is also building programmes around the platform to support creators as they grow.
One of those initiatives is the Serlzo Money Club, a creator growth and recognition programme designed to celebrate business milestones achieved through the platform.
The idea is to make growth visible. As creators and digital businesses reach new revenue milestones, Serlzo recognises those achievements through its Money Club and Awards programme, with rewards, recognition and access to opportunities tied to their progress.
The programme reflects a broader part of Serlzo’s approach to the creator economy. The company is not only providing the infrastructure creators use to sell, automate and manage customers. It is also creating an ecosystem that encourages them to build sustainable businesses and recognises measurable growth along the way.
That support extends into Serlzo’s community infrastructure, where creators can connect, learn and build alongside other entrepreneurs. Serlzo’s public creator ecosystem already includes communities focused on digital products, sales systems and business growth. Serlzo
For Serlzo, that creates a more complete relationship with creators. The platform provides the tools and AI intelligence to help them operate, while initiatives such as the Money Club create additional motivation, recognition and support as those businesses grow.
Serlzo has described the programme publicly as a way of recognising creator milestones with gifts, rewards and new opportunities as users grow their businesses on the platform.
