Caantin: There’s A Robot on The Phone 📲
The AI contact center that’s quietly eating a $100B industry
Hi there,
Welcome to the 9th edition of Next Capital, where we help you find Africa’s most promising startups—before anyone else does.
Last week, we wrote about the startup attempting to glam up the African beauty market. If you missed it, you can catch up here 👇🏾
Backdrop
In January this year, Njavwa Mutambo had an audacious goal:
“To build the world’s largest contact center — run entirely by AI.”
Five months later, Caantin is live and its AI agents already handle 60,000+ customer calls monthly for some of the largest banks, telcos, fintechs, and digital lenders across Africa.
And it’s now a business growing over 300% month-on-month.
The Problem
Customer service is still stuck in the past.
If you’re a bank or a fintech scaling across Africa or Latin America today, you face two options:
Build your in-house call center. This will cost a lot of money, people, and time.
Outsource to a BPO. It’s less expensive, but clunky, and often leads to a poor customer experience
Either way, it’s a human-powered model in a world that thrives on speed, scale, and quality.
In Africa, this is even more poignant.
Voice calls are still king — and there’s no getting around it.
Overall, in Africa, it is estimated that about 1 billion minutes of phone calls are made every single day, across mobile and landline networks.
For businesses trying to scale, this makes phone calls an important way of engaging customers.
You can onboard them, sell them services, and even resolve support issues via phone calls.
So, every phone call you can’t answer = lost customer trust, botched sales, and broken onboarding.
In an AI-first world, it’s a $100B+ global market that’s due for a rethink.
Caantin’s Solution
Caantin is building AI-powered contact centres for voice-first markets like Africa and Latin America.
Instead of hiring human agents, Caantin lets businesses deploy AI agents to handle:
Voice calls
WhatsApp
SMS
Email
This drops the cost of engaging customers, sales, marketing, onboarding, and support, letting these businesses scale faster at a fraction of the typical costs.
The agents can speak local languages - from Yoruba to Swahili and Xhosa. They integrate directly with existing business systems. And they work 24/7 — with no need for training, management, or office space.
A few use cases include:
Collections for loan recovery firms
Customer support for startups, banks, and telcos
And onboarding of new customers to these businesses
Why is this working?
Three things give Caantin a real edge:
Pay-as-you-go model
Customers are billed per second (~$0.06/min), just like airtime — no fixed contracts or upfront commitments. Businesses simply buy credits and initiate calls to users.Massive cost savings
AI agents don’t take salaries or time off. So they’re up to 90% cheaper to run than traditional BPOs.Built for markets where voice still dominates
In Africa, LATAM, and similar markets, SMS and apps haven’t killed voice calls — they complement them. So, businesses still need voice-led engagement. Caantin starts there, then layers on newer channels.
Beyond the business advantage, there’s another edge that sets Caantin apart.
They have the Founder edge. This isn’t Njavwa’s first rodeo
Before Caantin, Njavwa scaled Topup Mama to $5M in sales and led a 140-person team.
Even more relevant, last year, he ran a physical contact centre servicing global businesses.
So he knows the space really well, understands the workflows, and already had a strong customer pipeline to bring over when he launched.
The Money Talk
Caantin launched in January 2025 (yes, just five months ago). Since then, it’s grown significantly. It now does 60,000+ calls every month, all handled by AI agents. And its user base is growing 300% month-on-month.
Some of its key customers include Cowrywise, Fairmoney, Carbon, multiple African telcos, FMCG companies, and a top-five Nigerian bank that serves 40 million+ customers.
The coolest part? The growth is translating to cash.
Caantin’s revenue is already in the millions, with strong margins. Currently, they make between ¢0.2 - ¢0.5 per call, while spending ¢0.09 per call. That’s a 55%+ margin per call. But Caantin isn’t slowing down.
It’s planning to launch in new markets like LatAm and Asia (it’s already live in Mexico). It also plans to expand its customer profile and explore new use cases. Right now, it’s laser-focused on voice, because it’s still 60% of customer service volume in emerging markets.
But the vision is to power all customer conversations, whether it's voice, WhatsApp, SMS, or Email. All tied to the goal of helping global companies entering emerging markets scale customer engagement with as little hiring as possible.
Why we’re excited
Practical, revenue-generating AI in Africa. And it’s not backed by hype, but real adoption
The founder has a deep operational edge in the space and an early pipeline of strong customers
It’s got global potential. This is a $100 billion market that’s not tied to Africa alone.
They’re incredibly efficient, already reaching millions in revenue with a team of less than 10 people.
But what could go wrong?
Global opportunity means global competition. And while Caantin is one of the few players building voice AI for businesses, its moat could be eroded fast
They don’t have a foundational model, so there’s platform risk if the service provider breaks down
As smartphone penetration rises, texts may become a more preferable communication channel to customers, making voice AI less attractive for businesses looking to reach customers.
Looking at these risks, it makes sense that Caantin plans to build for all channels ultimately. If it wins, it’ll be “the” customer engagement product for global companies trying to reach the emerging markets. That’s a huge upside.
The Team
Caantin is being built by an all-star team of business people and engineers.
Njavwa Mutambo(CEO): 2x founder. Ex-CEO TopUp Mama– led a 140-person team and grew the business to millions of dollars in revenue.
We think Caantin is building what could become the AI backbone for customer engagement across emerging markets — and beyond.
What do you think? Hit reply to send us your thoughts.
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Till next week! 👋
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