AnyworkX, a local app developed by Nigerians for online transactions in a virtual market space, is designed to address hiccups in cross-border payments, while building a single digital ecosystem around the everyday transactions of millions of Africans, using scalable technology to advance business processes, writes Emma Okonji
Africa’s digital economy has produced successful platforms for payments, mobility, food delivery and e-commerce. Yet one of the continent’s biggest technology opportunities may still lie in something far more fundamental: bringing the fragmented transactions of everyday life into one trusted digital ecosystem.
That is the opportunity Nigerian technology company X-agon Digital Solutions Limited is pursuing with AnyworkX, a home-grown platform that began as a marketplace for services and is rapidly evolving into a broader consumer super app.
From finding a plumber in Lagos to ordering groceries for a parent from abroad, the app, which is a virtual market place, connects customers to verified artisans that have been carefully onboarded to serve customers’ needs.
The proposition is deliberately simple. A user who needs an electrician should not necessarily need one application, another to order dinner, another for groceries, another to locate a pharmacy and yet another to access businesses in a local market. AnyworkX wants to become the digital doorway through which all of those transactions can happen.
Already configured for use across 42 countries, with Nigeria serving as its principal operating market and expansion beachhead, the platform is positioning itself at the intersection of Africa’s services economy, e-commerce, food ordering, pharmacy fulfilment, local retail, logistics and digital payments. That intersection could prove commercially significant.
Addressing Customers’ Needs
Giving details of the app, the Chief Operating Officer, X-agon Digital Solutions, Mr. Segun Ogundipe, said AnyworkX was originally created to address a problem familiar to millions of Africans.
According to him, a leaking pipe, faulty generator, urgent electrician, cleaner, photographer, lawyer, mechanic, caterer or other professional need frequently begins with the same question: “Do you know somebody who can do this?”
Much of Africa’s enormous service economy remains fragmented, informal and dependent on personal referrals. Skilled people may exist within a few kilometres of a customer who needs them, yet neither knows the other exists. AnyworkX digitises that connection. The platform gives users access to providers across more than 300 service categories, covering both blue-collar and professional services. Technology enables users to discover providers based on location and service requirements, while verification processes are designed to address one of the biggest barriers to digital transactions in Africa: trust.
“But management soon recognised a bigger opportunity. The same customer looking for an air-conditioning technician today may need groceries tomorrow, medication later in the week and dinner on Friday evening. Instead of competing for a single transaction, why not build around the customer’s everyday life? That insight is driving AnyworkX’s transformation,” Ogundipe said.
One App Addressing Multiple Needs
The expanded AnyworkX ecosystem now brings together two enormous sides of Africa’s consumer economy.
The first is services. Users can discover and engage verified artisans, technicians, professionals and other service providers across hundreds of categories. The second is everyday commerce.
Customers can order from restaurants, grills, supermarkets, pharmacies and other participating merchants, with local-market commerce also forming part of the platform’s expansion strategy.
According to Ogundipe, the result is an increasingly integrated marketplace through which a consumer can book a plumber, order lunch, replenish groceries, purchase medication or shop from participating local merchants without continually moving between unrelated platforms.
This matters because the economics of a multi-category platform can be fundamentally different from those of a single-purpose application. A food-delivery platform must repeatedly persuade customers to order food. A services marketplace must wait until somebody needs a service. A platform combining multiple high-frequency and occasional needs has more opportunities to bring the same consumer back.
Frequency creates engagement. Engagement creates transactions. Transactions generate data. Data improves personalisation and efficiency. And a larger customer base attracts more merchants and service providers. That is the network effect AnyworkX is attempting to build, Ogundipe said.
The Business Model
Speaking on the business model of the app, Ogundipe said for investors, the more important question is not simply what AnyworkX does, but how activity on the platform can become revenue.
“Its model is designed around transaction-based monetisation rather than simply charging users to download an application. Within its service marketplace, the platform facilitates transactions between customers and service providers, creating opportunities for fees around successfully completed jobs and other value-added services.
“Within commerce, AnyworkX has adopted a merchant-friendly approach intended to lower the resistance businesses often have to joining digital marketplaces. Participating merchants can retain the value of the products they sell, while the platform can earn facilitation income around transactions rather than relying solely on conventional merchant commissions. Logistics creates another layer of potential economics as ordering volumes scale.
“The broader architecture can therefore support multiple monetisation opportunities over time: services, commerce facilitation, logistics, payments and other ecosystem services, while much of the underlying technology infrastructure serves the same expanding customer base.
That distinction is important,” he said.
According to him, the ambition is not to build several unrelated businesses inside an app. It is to build one digital transaction infrastructure capable of serving multiple categories of everyday expenditure.
Addressing Local Markets
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of AnyworkX’s strategy is its planned digitisation of local-market commerce. Africa’s commerce story is not confined to shopping malls, supermarket chains and formal retailers. A significant portion of everyday trade still takes place through traditional markets like Mile 12, Daleko, Oyingbo markets in Lagos, Wuse market in Abuja, Oja Oba in Ibadan.
These markets have huge inventory and customers but limited digital infrastructure. AnyworkX sees an opportunity to bring these markets into organised digital commerce without requiring each trader or market to build an expensive standalone application. Imagine being able to digitally shop from a familiar local market, arrange fulfilment and have purchases delivered to your home.
The implications extend beyond convenience. For merchants, it means visibility beyond foot traffic. For consumers, it means access without physical presence. For logistics companies, it creates delivery demand. And for AnyworkX, every newly digitised market potentially adds merchants, products, customers and transactions to an infrastructure that has already been built. This is where the scalability argument becomes particularly compelling.
Diaspora Opportunities
Highlighting the diaspora opportunities, Ogundipe, said: “There is another use case with potentially significant implications. An African living in London, Toronto, Atlanta or Dubai may want to pay for groceries, food, medication or services for parents and relatives back home. Today, this often involves sending money first and leaving the recipient to complete the transaction. A cross-border marketplace can change that behaviour from “send money to buy something” to “buy the thing directly.
“AnyworkX’s 42-country architecture and cross-border capability are designed with this opportunity in mind: enabling customers in one location to initiate transactions that are fulfilled locally for recipients elsewhere. That creates a potentially powerful bridge between Africa’s diaspora spending power and the continent’s domestic services and retail economy.
Rather than competing only in the remittance market, the platform can potentially participate in what happens after money would otherwise have been remitted, the actual purchase of goods and services.”
About Partners
For restaurants, supermarkets, pharmacies, local merchants and service professionals, joining a marketplace is ultimately about one thing: incremental business.
AnyworkX’s proposition is that businesses should not have to become technology companies to participate effectively in the digital economy. A neighbourhood pharmacy may have excellent inventory and trusted pharmacists but limited digital reach. A restaurant may have loyal customers but no sophisticated ordering infrastructure. An artisan may be highly skilled but virtually invisible online.
AnyworkX provides the digital storefront, customer-discovery infrastructure and transaction environment through which those businesses can become accessible to a much wider market.
Even businesses that already have their own applications can potentially benefit. A standalone merchant app primarily serves customers who already know the merchant. A marketplace creates discovery, putting that merchant in front of consumers who may never have searched for its individual application.
AnyworkX therefore does not necessarily have to replace merchants’ existing digital channels. It can complement them, Ogundipe said. R
Trust Issues
Technology platforms operating in Africa eventually encounter a problem that cannot be solved by elegant software alone: trust. Is the technician genuine? Will the merchant deliver? Will the customer pay? Will the service provider turn up? Will money be released before the transaction is completed?
AnyworkX has consequently made verification, transaction controls and accountability central to its platform architecture, including multi-stage provider verification and mechanisms designed to improve transaction confidence. If successfully executed at scale, this trust layer may ultimately prove as valuable as the marketplace itself.
The African informal economy does not suffer from a shortage of buyers and sellers. It frequently suffers from the absence of trusted infrastructure connecting them.
Economics of Scale
The investment thesis around AnyworkX becomes clearer when viewed not as another delivery application but as an ecosystem business. Digital platforms can exhibit powerful operating leverage.
Technology that initially supports 10,000 users does not necessarily cost ten times as much when supporting 100,000 users. A merchant integrated into the platform can fulfil hundreds or thousands of transactions. A service provider onboarded once can serve multiple customers over time. And every additional participant can increase the usefulness of the network for everybody else. More customers attract more merchants and service providers. More merchants and providers improve selection. Better selection attracts more customers. Higher transaction volumes make logistics more efficient. More transactions generate better data. And increasing data can improve recommendations, matching, risk management, pricing and customer retention.
Built for Africa
Although Nigeria provides the obvious launchpad, with its large population, rapidly expanding digital adoption, enormous informal economy and highly fragmented services market, AnyworkX’s architecture has been developed with wider geographic expansion in mind. The platform is already configured across 42 countries, allowing the company to approach growth as a repeatable market-entry exercise rather than rebuilding the product for every new territory.
This matters enormously from an investment perspective. A technology company serving one city can become a good business. A platform whose underlying infrastructure can be replicated across dozens of large and underserved markets has the possibility of becoming something substantially bigger.
According to Ogundipe, Africa’s demographic trajectory strengthens that proposition. A young population, accelerating smartphone penetration, urbanisation, digital payments and rising consumer expectations are gradually moving more everyday economic activity online. The winners may not necessarily be companies that digitise only one category. They may be platforms that become habitual gateways to several categories at once.
According to him, AnyworkX remains in the growth phase, but the company has already built a user community running into tens of thousands while expanding its merchant and service-provider network.
Its next challenge is execution: converting platform breadth into transaction frequency, rapidly expanding high-quality merchant supply, strengthening fulfilment, acquiring customers efficiently and building repeat behaviour. That challenge should not be underestimated. Super apps are difficult to build precisely because they require technology, operations, payments, logistics, merchant relationships and customer trust to work simultaneously. Yet that difficulty can itself create defensibility. Once a platform reaches meaningful density, replicating the ecosystem becomes considerably harder than replicating an individual feature.
Executive Director, Product Development & Strategy, X-agon Digital Solutions Limited, Mr. Bolaji Bayo-Tijani, described the company’s ambition in broader terms.
He said, “We started with a simple question: how can technology make it easier and safer for people to access the services they need? But as we built the platform, we realised the opportunity was much larger. The same person who needs a trusted electrician also eats, buys groceries, needs medication, shops and supports family members. We therefore began building around the person rather than around a single industry. Our ambition is to build AnyworkX into a digital infrastructure layer for Africa’s services and everyday commerce economy, connecting consumers, professionals, merchants, markets and fulfilment partners through one trusted ecosystem.”
“AnyworkX does not need to own thousands of restaurants. It does not need to own supermarkets. It does not need to employ hundreds of thousands of artisans. And it does not need to own the inventory sitting in traditional markets. Its opportunity is to become the digital connective tissue between them and the consumer. That produces a potentially asset-light path to scale,” Bayo-Tijani said.
“If AnyworkX can acquire customers economically, retain them across multiple use cases, deepen merchant density, establish reliable fulfilment and replicate the model across African markets, its addressable opportunity could expand dramatically without a corresponding linear increase in physical assets. This is the part of the story likely to interest investors,” Bayo-Tijani added.
Africa’s Digital Front Door
According to Bayo-Tijani, Africa probably does not need another app simply because another app can be built. What it does need are technologies capable of organising fragmented markets, reducing friction, establishing trust and giving consumers easier access to the enormous economic activity already taking place around them. That is the bet behind AnyworkX.
“A plumber can become digitally discoverable. A neighbourhood restaurant can acquire customers beyond its street. A pharmacy can fulfil an order for a family whose payer may be thousands of kilometres away. A local-market trader can potentially participate in e-commerce without ever building a website. And a consumer can access all of them through one digital identity and one ecosystem,” he explained.
“If AnyworkX executes that vision successfully, what started as a Nigerian marketplace for finding service providers could evolve into something far more consequential: a transaction layer connecting millions of African consumers to the people, businesses and markets that power their everyday lives. And that is where the bigger investment story lies,” Bayo-Tijani said.
According to him, “The question is no longer whether Africa’s everyday economy will become increasingly digital. It is which platforms will become the gateways through which that economy flows. AnyworkX is making its bid to become one of them.”