About Viyn pronounced “vine”

Commerce is already happening in the chat. We’re building the tools businesses need to win there.

Across Africa, businesses already discover customers, answer questions, negotiate prices, collect payments and close sales through social media and messaging.

Viyn is being built to make that way of selling easier to manage, easier to track, and much harder to lose.

Two customers at an outdoor market stall looking at a phone with the trader, choosing from his rack of phone cases

This is the storefront

For millions of businesses, the shop, the catalogue and the checkout all live in a chat thread.

Why we started

Too many sales disappear inside conversations.

Viyn started with a simple observation: people were already trying to buy through WhatsApp, Instagram and other social channels, but businesses did not always have the tools to manage what happened after the first message.

A customer asks about a product. Another asks for delivery details. Someone else says they will pay later. A comment shows strong buying intent. Then the business gets busy, the conversation moves down the inbox, and a potential sale is forgotten.

We saw the same pattern repeatedly: the demand was there, but the process around the conversation was fragmented. That became the starting point for Viyn.

Close-up of a person's hands typing a message on a phone
  1. Post / DM
  2. Enquiry
  3. Conversation Buried in the inbox
  4. Order
  5. Paid

The gap Viyn is built to close: the step between a real conversation and an order that gets paid for.

Selling through social media is simple to start. Managing it at scale is not.

Social platforms are excellent at helping businesses meet customers. They were not originally designed to work as complete sales operating systems.

A business owner taping a parcel shut, a thank-you card already stuck to the box

  • Conversations get buried

    Customers move between comments, DMs and messaging apps. Important enquiries slip beneath newer conversations.

  • Follow-up depends on memory

    A business owner means to follow up tomorrow. Without a system, tomorrow becomes next week — or never.

  • Sales are hard to track

    A merchant knows Instagram or WhatsApp brings sales without knowing which conversations, posts or channels actually produce revenue.

  • The buying journey is fragmented

    Conversation, order, payment and customer history live in different tools — or only in the merchant’s head.

Why now

The customer behaviour Viyn is built for is already here.

Businesses do not need to convince customers to use messaging. Customers already use it to reach brands, and Nigerian MSMEs already lean heavily on social platforms to engage them.

  • 23%

    of Nigerian MSMEs surveyed named WhatsApp Business as a technology they use in their business — ahead of Facebook (19%) and Instagram (15%).

    Nigeria

    Source: PwC Nigeria MSME Survey, 2024

    Administered online to 557 MSME operators across 13 sectors and 29 Nigerian states; fieldwork conducted in 2022 and published in the 2024 report.

  • 73.3%

    of consumers surveyed prefer messaging when communicating with a business.

    Global — 22 markets

    Source: Meta-commissioned Kantar research, 2026

    Survey of 11,056 online adults across 22 markets. A global result — Nigeria was not among the markets, so it must not be read as Nigeria- or Africa-specific.

  • 72.4%

    of consumers surveyed are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers messaging.

    Global — 22 markets

    Source: Meta-commissioned Kantar research, 2026

    Survey of 11,056 online adults across 22 markets. Self-reported purchase likelihood — not an observed conversion rate, and not a Viyn result.

The messaging figures above are global — the study covered 22 markets and did not include Nigeria. We cite them as evidence of how people buy, not as African or Nigerian data, and not as Viyn results.

A sales workspace built around the conversation.

Viyn brings the parts of social selling that normally live across separate apps into one workflow. The goal is simple: help a business move a customer from enquiry to order to payment without losing the context in between.

A business owner at their desk taking a customer call, laptop and order notes in front of them

  1. Discover

    Unified social inbox

  2. Message

    One thread per customer, across channels

  3. Qualify

    Conversation and sales status tracking

  4. Follow up

    Follow-up reminders and automation

  5. Order

    The order built from the conversation, with items and totals

  6. Get paid

    Payment link shared in the chat, raised against that order

  7. Track

    Order status and sales analytics

Everything listed here is live in Viyn today. Capabilities still in development are marked as coming soon on the product pages rather than being described here as if they had shipped.

Built around how African businesses already sell.

  • Conversation first

    Viyn starts from the customer conversation rather than asking merchants to move every buyer into a traditional ecommerce funnel.

  • Local commerce

    Payments, pricing and workflows reflect the realities of the markets Viyn serves, rather than assuming every business operates like a large online retailer.

  • Pay for usage, not seats you don’t need

    Our Pay As You Go model lets a business start small and expand as its customer activity grows.

    See how pricing works

  • One journey, not disconnected tools

    Messaging, follow-up, orders, payment and reporting behave like stages of a single customer journey.

Who’s building it

Built from experience with social technology, messaging and sales workflows.

Viyn is being built by people who have worked on technology that helps organisations communicate with customers and prospects.

That experience made one thing increasingly clear: as more buying behaviour moves into social platforms and messaging, small businesses need better infrastructure for managing the conversations that lead to revenue. Viyn is our attempt to build that infrastructure for African businesses.

James Agwa

Founder, Viyn

James has worked on technology that helps organisations reach and communicate with customers. Watching businesses run their entire sales process out of a messaging inbox is what led to Viyn.

Read the founder story LinkedIn profile

Principles we build by

  • Build for real workflows

    We design around how merchants already communicate and sell, instead of asking them to change their behaviour first.

  • Keep it accessible

    Small businesses should be able to start using serious commerce tools without enterprise budgets or a long implementation.

  • Automation should help, not annoy

    Automation should remove repetitive work while leaving the business in control of its customer relationships.

  • Earn trust

    Payments, customer conversations and sales data are business infrastructure. Reliability, transparency and responsible handling of that data are product requirements, not extras.

Where we’re going

We want every conversation with buying intent to have a fair chance of becoming a sale.

Our long-term vision is to build the commerce layer between social discovery and completed transactions.

As customers keep discovering businesses through social media and communicating through messaging, Viyn should give merchants the infrastructure to understand intent, respond at the right time, record the order, collect payment and learn what drives growth — without leaving the channels where their customers already are.

Your next customer may already be in your DMs or commenting on your posts.

Bring your conversations, payments and sales workflow together with Viyn.

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