Hi there,
Welcome to the 13th 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 building Nigeria’s first unofficial “Tube map” for shared rides. If you missed it, you can catch up here 👇🏾
Startup: ProteusAI
Location: Nigeria
Backdrop
At the turn of the 20th Century, Peter Drucker wrote the most important book about human productivity, titled The Effective Executive.
In the book, he stated that someday, machines will surpass human capacity for work. They’ll go beyond manufacturing things we use, and down into every form of “work” we can do as humans.
Some 80 years later, there’s a whole category of software companies called “Productivity Tools”, from Gmail to Notion and Clickup. And they’ve helped people get more out of their work hours.
But today, we’re faced with the biggest impending explosion of productivity tools in history — AI. This startup is building a tool to unlock that explosion.
The problem
Three years ago, the world got a new tool on its hands: LLMs. They’re highly intelligent chatbots equipped with human-level knowledge on just about everything. This meant that they were perfect for all kinds of knowledge work: research, coding, writing, and even art.
An even cooler thing that happened is that many of the companies providing these LLMs opened up their tech so other engineers could give their own apps the all-knowing superpower of LLMs.
There’s just one problem with that: even nontechnical people wanted it too.
Everyone—writers, HR managers, marketers—could use custom-made LLMs to make their work faster. But building one takes technical skills, something most people don’t have. Two ex-Andela engineers decided to tackle this problem.
ProteusAI’s fix
Simply put, ProteusAI is building a no-code builder for AI applications.
It’s called ProteusAI studio, and it’s a simple, intuitive way for non-technical people to design small AI apps that suit their needs. Whether it’s an onboarding tool for new staff, an editing tool for journalists, or a debugging tool for engineering teams.
To kick off their solution, they built a suite of products using their own no-code builder and tested it with customers to demonstrate its value.
Having experienced onboarding woes personally across multiple organisations, they built an AI employee onboarding tool called OnBuddy.
It’s a chatbot that lives on Slack, consumes all of a company’s context on files, channels, and conversations, and can help employees get things done faster. But it’s built for HR teams and new hires. It helps HR teams get new hires up to speed faster, and it helps the new hires absorb the internal context with little human help, with some of its features including intelligent knowledge management.
So, ProteusAI built two things: an AI studio that helps companies build AI widgets for themselves, and a tool to help HR teams onboard faster, built using the AI studio.
The money talk
Right now, 4 companies are privately piloting on Onbuddy, with over a dozen on the waiting list. A public launch is happening this month (July 2025) with Slack as its first major integration.
Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp are on the roadmap. Right now, pricing is per team, not per user, because not everyone’s a power user.
The opportunity
Think about what Canva did for the visual design economy. It drastically dropped the barrier to creating good design, whether it was PowerPoint slides, ad posters, or logos. The result is that visual design has exploded. Out of that explosion came the $90 billion company we call Canva today.
AI is a much bigger opportunity than visual design. Conservative estimates say it could be a $10 trillion opportunity. ProteusAI has the potential to be the Canva of the AI economy, by making it simpler and easier for anyone to build their own AI tools.
If it pulls it off, it’s not only going to become a massively important part of the AI economy, it’ll be a category-defining company, increasing the overall volume of AI products in the world.
Why we’re excited
So, to keep things short, here’s why we’re excited:
Category-defining market: AI will be the biggest value unlock of the next century, and ProteusAI is building the catalyst for it to happen
Distribution-first approach: They’re building products using their studio and testing them with users, demonstrating the value of their studio first-hand
Enterprise Focus: They have a dual-advantage where they appeal directly to consumers within enterprises, giving them a unique value prop that suits both people and teams
But what could go wrong?
AI turns out to be a fad. There’s a non-zero possibility that the AI boom isn’t as big as everyone thought, and ProteusAI’s market ends up being much smaller
Provider Risk. ProteusAI is built on bigger, foundational models like OpenAI and Anthropic’s models. These companies could roll out directly competing studios that are more accessible than ProteusAI’s platform. For instance, OpenAI already lets some users create custom GPTs.
The team
ProteusAI is being built by two ex-Andela engineers:
Wale Ayandiran and Franklin Chieze both have over 10 years of engineering experience and were previously software engineers at Andela.
If you’re excited about what ProteusAI is building and would like to learn more, send a reply.
Till next week!🫡
Enjoyed reading this? Forward it to someone you think would enjoy it as well.
 | A guest post by
|