In 2020, Babatola Awe, then a marketing consultant for Deloitte, was paying for Zoom, Microsoft 365, and a rising record of worldwide software program instruments, all priced in {dollars}. Each bill was a reminder for Awe: African companies had been paying Western firms to do African work.
When COVID-19 hit in March that yr, work broke. Paperwork had been trapped in locked places of work. Approvals relied on bodily signatures. Emails grew to become databases. WhatsApp teams grew to become mission administration methods.
For Awe and his co-founder, Akintayo Okekunle, the dysfunction was costly.
“We requested ourselves, How lengthy will Africa rely on the West to allow enterprise productiveness?” Awe recollects.
By 2021, that they had a solution: not for much longer. The 2 stop their company jobs and launched Flowmono, an AI-driven platform combining e-signatures, workflow automation, and doc administration, constructed particularly for African companies.
Day 1: The ₦720,000 drawback
The spark got here from a shopper mission. Somebody requested them to construct a contract administration platform. Whereas engaged on it, a query emerged: How do individuals truly signal contracts digitally?
The reply was clear.
DocuSign charged ₦720,000 ($480) yearly. Adobe Signal charged ₦431,820 ($288). For Nigerian companies, these costs had been prohibitive.
“Their options are costly and never tailor-made for Africa,” Awe says. “That’s once we determined to construct one thing for Africa, by Africans, and for the world.”
Flowmono launched at ₦204,000 ($140) yearly, greater than 70% cheaper than DocuSign, greater than 50% cheaper than Adobe Signal.
However cheaper wasn’t sufficient. It needed to work at an enterprise-grade degree.
The crew made a important choice: construct all the things from scratch. No white-labeling. No licencing third-party code. Each line of code written in-house utilizing Angular, .NET, C#, JavaScript, and TypeScript.
“We constructed all the things ourselves; our platform is 100% our mental property,” Awe says. “Each instrument, each module, each line of code is designed for Africa, however benchmarked to international requirements.”
Day 500: The shoppers who compelled them to degree up
Flowmono’s early prospects weren’t startups testing an affordable various. They had been enterprises with actual safety necessities and 0 tolerance for failure: Stanbic IBTC, UAC, CardinalStone, and Coronation Financial institution.
Banks demanded audit trails. Monetary companies corporations wanted encryption assembly worldwide requirements. Corporates needed seamless integrations.
Whereas the options labored from the beginning, the consumer expertise instructed a special story.
“It was the UX that prospects didn’t discover seamless,” Awe admits. “This compelled us to revamp our entire product interface in the course of 2025.”
The overhaul was complete, together with navigation, customisation, and your entire visible design.
“Half of the options that exist on Flowmono right this moment got here straight from buyer requests, particularly enterprise prospects,” Awe says.
Each enterprise demanded extra. And each demand made Flowmono stronger.
Touchdown Stanbic IBTC as a buyer required intelligence, preparation, and endurance.
“We received into the room by way of networking,” Awe explains. “However we additionally knew they had been utilizing Adobe Signal, and we knew their use circumstances already.”
The Flowmono crew had executed their homework. They understood Stanbic’s workflows and the place Adobe was falling brief.
“We saved Stanbic greater than 70% of the associated fee in comparison with what they had been spending on Adobe.”
However realizing the worth and shutting the deal had been various things.
What adopted was seven to eight months of proof-of-value demonstrations; a number of rounds of testing, safety audits, integration trials, and stakeholder approvals. Banks don’t transfer quick. Enterprise procurement doesn’t favor startups.
“It took like 7-8 months to shut with them after doing a sequence of proof of worth,” Awe recollects.
When Stanbic lastly signed, it validated greater than Flowmono’s product; it validated the technique: construct for enterprise, value for Africa, compete on worth, not simply price.
Extra importantly, Stanbic grew to become proof. If a Nigerian financial institution trusted Flowmono with delicate paperwork and compliance workflows, different enterprises might too.
Past signatures: Constructing the working system
By 2023, prospects had been not simply asking for sooner signatures. They needed sooner selections.
Approvals caught in e-mail chains. Vendor onboarding delayed by handbook processes. Compliance checks slowed by paperwork. Monetary evaluations bottlenecked by spreadsheets.
The enlargement was inevitable. Between 2024 and 2025, the corporate launched new options to achieve extra prospects: Flowmono Automate and Flowmono VPMC.
Flowmono Automate permits companies to design customized workflows for HR onboarding, procurement, finance approvals, and contract administration—with out writing code.
Flowmono VPMC manages vendor relationships, buy orders, and compliance documentation from a single dashboard.
“If 20% of organisations use Flowmono right this moment, we are able to create interconnectivity between enterprise processes that the world has by no means seen earlier than,” Awe says.
The promise was measurable: companies adopting Flowmono lower approval instances by as much as 50%, diminished compliance danger, and freed staff from handbook paperwork.
Flowmono was turning into what it all the time supposed to be: an AI workflow working system.
The AI that indicators (however by no means with out permission)
In 2024, Flowmono built-in AI, not as a substitute for human judgment, however as an enhancement.
“Know-how ought to make people extra human,” Awe says. “AI ought to deal with repetitive duties so people can concentrate on strategic work.”
Flowmono’s AI now offers doc summarisation, automated workflow creation, danger detection in contracts, and clever doc search utilizing Pure Language Processing.
Essentially the most bold function: an AI co-signer.
“It doesn’t signal in your behalf autonomously,” Awe clarifies. “It reads paperwork, categorises them, matches them to the right signature saved securely, and recommends actions based mostly on guidelines you set.”
An government might instruct the AI to robotically signal reimbursement requests below ₦50,000, whereas flagging bigger contracts for handbook evaluate.
Safety stays paramount. Flowmono is PCI DSS-certified and employs encryption and tokenisation to make sure signatures by no means contact cloud AI companies.
“The AI assists, however it by no means replaces the human within the choice loop.”
Flowmono has scaled with out conventional enterprise capital, supported as a substitute by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub.
The subscription mannequin is easy: ₦204,000 ($142) yearly versus DocuSign’s ₦720,000 ($500) and Adobe Signal’s ₦431,820 ($301).
Buyer retention is powerful sufficient that enterprises increase from signatures into full workflow automation—suggesting actual issues are being solved.
Day 1000
Flowmono’s guess is straightforward: African companies will more and more select platforms designed for African realities, priced in native foreign money, compliant with native rules (Nigeria’s Digital Economic system Invoice recognises digital signatures), and supported by native groups.
The obstacles to adoption are actual; many companies nonetheless depend on paper or free instruments. They don’t see fast ROI from subscription software program. There’s mistrust of digital methods, particularly round safety.
Flowmono addresses these by way of training, certification, and enterprise buyer proof factors.
“Simply as digital finance has developed, so will enterprise processes,” Awe says. “Distant work is right here to remain. E-signatures and AI-driven workflows are the following frontier.”
Awe sees Flowmono as infrastructure, not simply software program.
“Our final purpose isn’t just e-signing, however clever enterprise automation,” he says. “We’re constructing the way forward for work in Africa—safe, environment friendly, and powered by AI.”
Three years after launch, Flowmono serves enterprises together with Stanbic IBTC, UAC, and CardinalStone, organisations that might afford DocuSign or Adobe Signal however selected a Lagos-based various.
The explanations are concrete: Flowmono prices lower than its worldwide alternate options, provides same-day assist in Nigerian time zones, and builds options prospects truly request relatively than international product roadmap priorities.
“Each buyer matured us,” Okekunle displays. “Each compelled us to earn belief, not assume it.”
Flowmono remains to be evolving. However the precept stays unchanged: Work ought to circulation, not get caught.
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