Iain Usiri

Iain Usiri runs a company that gives its software away for free and still raised $32 million. The trick is what happens after the software arrives.

Ramani - Swahili for "map" - hands free point-of-sale and inventory tools to the small warehouses that move soap, sugar and soda across Tanzania. These are the micro distribution centers, the MDCs, the unglamorous middle of the consumer-packaged-goods chain. Once Ramani can see their real-time inventory, it lends against it. Software is the Trojan horse; finance is the business.

As co-founder and CEO, Usiri sits at the centre of roughly 100 of those warehouses, a lending license from the Bank of Tanzania, and a team of about 70 working out of Dar es Salaam. In a single year the network pushed around $72 million in goods through its rails.

His pitch is blunt: "The consumer-packaged goods supply chain is one of the biggest in Africa, but it is grossly underserved by the current financial service providers." Ramani exists to serve it - and, in 2025, to partner with Tanzania Commercial Bank on what it calls the country's first national-scale financing platform for small businesses.

In 2019, Usiri got on a plane to Tanzania and did not buy a return ticket. He gave up his US immigration status to do it. The destination was home; the reason was a company that did not exist yet.

The decision had a long fuse. As a teenager applying to Stanford, he wrote his college admissions essay about coming back one day to build infrastructure in Tanzania. Most people file that kind of essay under "things you said at seventeen." He kept the receipt.

By the time he boarded, he had the resume to stay in California for good: a Stanford computer science degree finished in 2016, a product manager seat at Salesforce, a co-founded startup called Verbatm, time in Pear VC's Garage program. He left anyway.

Ramani did not arrive fully formed. It was, in order, a consumer-packaged-goods distributor, then a pure software company, then software with a credit line bolted on. Each version taught the next one what to stop doing.

The final shape is almost suspiciously simple. Salespeople run the app on a specialized point-of-sale device with a printer, right there in the warehouse. "By stitching together all the real-time inventory of each of their resellers and unifying it into a single brand view, brands are able to manage their networks better," Usiri says. Once the data is trustworthy, lending follows: a 30-day inventory financing product, and revolving interest-free credit lines for the shops downstream.

Growth, before the raise, was the kind investors circle in red: month-over-month GMV climbing 68%, then settling into a still-loud 36% on a bigger base.

The three iterations

Each pivot kept the customer and changed the product. The third one stuck.

He keeps comparing Ramani to Samsung

Not the gadgets - the gravity. Usiri talks about Ramani playing the role Samsung played in South Korea: a single company that helps pull an entire economy forward and gives a generation of young people somewhere ambitious to work.

It is a big claim from a 70-person team in Dar es Salaam. It is also exactly the kind of claim you would expect from someone who held onto a college essay for a decade and then acted on it.