Cossi Achille Arouko and Samy Chiba founded Bujeti in 2022 on a straightforward idea. African businesses weren't failing at payments—they were failing at control.
The two entrepreneurs saw a gap in financial infrastructure across the continent. Specifically, they identified the layer that governs how money moves in and out of accounts.
Three years later, their Y Combinator-backed platform now offers payroll alongside corporate cards, expense management, vendor payments, tax solutions, and multi-currency operations.
We sat down with both founders to understand what payroll reveals about Bujeti's core mission. They explained what it takes to build a Finance Control Centre from scratch in a region where infrastructure is still developing.
Payroll seems like an obvious next step for a fintech like Bujeti. Why the wait?
According to Arouko, building this has been anything but obvious. In the beginning, businesses needed visibility and control over spending—cards, budgets, approvals.
That was the immediate need they addressed.
Then vendors emerged as a problem. Businesses were paying them through WhatsApp messages with no audit trails or approval workflows.
Bujeti built a solution for that too.
Tax became urgent next, especially with recent changes at FIRS and the 2025 Tax Act. So they launched the Tax Vault.
Arouko noted each product came because they observed businesses hitting a specific wall. Payroll sat on the roadmap all along, but they were deliberate about timing.
"We did not want to bolt payroll on as a feature," he said. The goal was making it native to the platform, connecting hiring decisions to budgets and payroll to reconciliation.
Chiba raised another critical issue: trust. Payroll is the most sensitive financial operation any business runs.
An expense management bug can be fixed quietly. A payroll bug on the last working day of the month creates a people crisis, not just a finance problem.
They needed absolute certainty before launching publicly.
What does "Finance Control Centre" actually mean in practice?
Most businesses experience their finances as disconnected events, according to Arouko. Money flows in, money flows out, HR runs payroll separately, and finance reconciles later.
Someone uses a card. Someone else uploads the receipt weeks later.
Nobody gets a real-time financial picture until it's too late to change course.
A Finance Control Centre changes that fundamentally. Every financial event happens inside one system under one governance structure with one audit trail.
Control becomes structural, not retrospective. You cannot overspend a budget because the system blocks it.
You cannot run payroll without approval because the workflow requires it.
Arouko explained that PAYE deductions are ring-fenced the moment they're calculated. Forgetting them becomes technically impossible.
Chiba used an aviation analogy that captures the vision clearly. A pilot doesn't land a plane by remembering what instruments showed two hours ago.
They rely on a dashboard where everything is visible in real time. Controls sit right there.
"That is what we are building for finance teams," Chiba said. Not a better spreadsheet, but a cockpit.
