The smallest shop in Lagos can contain a surprisingly long checkout queue. It fits inside a phone. A buyer sees a product on social media, sends a message, asks whether it is still available, receives an account number, leaves the conversation to open a bank app, makes a transfer, returns with a screenshot and waits while the seller plays cashier, bookkeeper and amateur detective. The sale began at the speed of chat. Payment arrived wearing hiking boots.
Kayode Disu has built his second company around that awkward interval. Vendy, the Lagos company he co-founded with Peter Ekunkoya, began with a compact promise: let a merchant turn WhatsApp into a shop. A seller could display inventory, handle questions, produce an invoice and accept payment close to the conversation where the customer first said, in effect, “I want this.” No new consumer app. No pilgrimage through unfamiliar screens.
That is the visible product. Disu’s more consequential ambition sits underneath it. He wants Vendy to become payment infrastructure for commerce conducted through chat - a layer that can connect bank accounts, wallets, cards and mobile money while allowing the transaction to feel almost incidental. The catalogue attracts the eye; the rail moves the money.
“The infrastructure for chat-based commerce in Africa is still missing.”
A career spent behind the screen
Disu did not arrive at this idea through the usual founder theatre of a napkin, a lightning bolt and a suspiciously tidy origin story. His preparation was longer and less decorative. He studied computer science at Babcock University from 2001 to 2005, then accumulated more than 15 years across software development, information technology, payments and digital security.
In 2012 he founded i.Sec, a company that developed digital-security solutions for Nigerian banks. He led it until 2021. Security work lives in the parts of technology customers should never have to admire. When it succeeds, nothing dramatic occurs. The lock holds. The transaction completes. The system behaves. It is an apprenticeship in invisible value, and it helps explain why Disu’s present obsession is not merely another attractive storefront.
His public professional recommendations describe a leader who chases down tasks, stays close to project plans and can move between a solution’s technical details and its operational problems. The portrait is useful because Vendy’s problem refuses to remain in one department. A chat checkout is interface design until it touches a bank. Then it is integration, compliance, security, reconciliation and customer trust, all squeezing through the same bright little “Pay” button.
The co-founder before the company
The other durable system in the Vendy story is friendship. Disu and Ekunkoya knew each other for roughly 20 years before becoming co-founders. In startup arithmetic, where teams are sometimes assembled after three coffees and a shared spreadsheet, two decades is lavish due diligence.
Their experience is complementary. Disu brought software, payment and security depth. Ekunkoya brought a career in finance, strategy, sales and commercial work across Africa and Latin America, including time in large consumer-goods companies. One understood the rails; the other understood how goods move and businesses grow. Vendy joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch, with Disu listed as a founder, and established its base in Lagos.
The company’s first expression was easy to explain. A merchant could create a customised WhatsApp shop. A buyer could browse a catalogue, search for a product, add it to a cart, receive automated invoicing and pay. The familiar language of ecommerce was tucked beside the familiar rhythm of conversation.
The product’s restraint is the point. Vendy does not need to persuade a buyer to love a fresh destination before making a purchase. It begins where buyer and seller already meet. Good infrastructure has impeccable manners: it arrives when needed and does not ask to be the main character.
The widget beneath the shop window
By 2025, Disu was describing a larger bet. Vendy’s main opportunity, as the company saw it, was not simply helping sellers arrange products attractively in WhatsApp. It was controlling the payment moment across chat-based commerce. Its widget runs on the buyer’s device alongside WhatsApp rather than inside the platform. When a customer chooses to pay, the interface presents available linked methods without demanding a fresh account or app download.
Vendy says it connects with African banks and mobile-money providers including Sterling, Kuda, Opay, FCMB, Momo and First Bank. Its commercial model combines a transaction fee with tiered software subscriptions for businesses. The company has also described APIs for other products, suggesting a route from a tool merchants use directly to a rail other developers can build upon.
“We’re building the UPI for Africa starting on WhatsApp.”
The comparison is a statement of intent, not a claim of equivalence. India’s Unified Payments Interface became shared public plumbing for instant bank payments. Vendy is a private company working through a different regulatory and technical landscape. What the phrase reveals is Disu’s preferred scale of problem. He is interested in the connective tissue, not only the skin.
His vision for the user experience is disarmingly domestic. He has written that people will eventually pay businesses and send money to friends and family on social apps as naturally as they send contacts, locations, images or videos. Those actions no longer feel like “using technology.” They feel like talking. Disu wants payment to borrow that ease.
A product built on somebody else’s street
The opportunity comes with an architectural joke: the more naturally Vendy fits around WhatsApp, the more visibly it depends on a platform it does not own. Meta can change policies. Bank integrations are technically demanding. Regulation varies from one African market to the next. A payment experience that feels simple to the buyer is often simple in the way a swan looks relaxed - the work has merely gone underwater.
Build around a daily habit, reduce downloads and keep the purchase close to the conversation.
Depend on external platforms, local financial rails and rules that change across borders.
Storefronts, catalogues, invoices and payment for merchants working through WhatsApp.
An underlying payment layer that travels across chat interfaces and developer products.
There are also competitors pursuing pieces of the same social-commerce stack, from consumer payment products to merchant CRM and catalogue tools. Disu’s answer is depth: direct integrations, its own processing capability, compliance work and a developer ecosystem. These are unfashionable ingredients compared with a clever interface. They are also the ingredients that tend to determine whether money arrives.
Vendy’s aspiration is almost comic in its modesty of appearance. The company would like to be everywhere value is exchanged on a social platform, while remaining largely unnoticed. It wants the buyer to remember the thing bought, the seller to remember the sale, and neither to develop a vivid opinion about the plumbing.
The second-founder advantage
Second-time founders are often less seduced by novelty for its own sake. Disu’s path supports that reading. The connective thread from i.Sec to Vendy is financial infrastructure: first protecting systems used by banks, then shortening the distance between a customer’s intent and a merchant’s certainty. One chapter guarded the transaction. The next is redesigning its entrance.
That does not make the outcome inevitable. It makes the bet coherent. Vendy has moved from a sharply legible merchant tool toward a broader and more difficult infrastructure claim. Success requires the company to keep the first experience simple while the machinery beneath it grows more complicated. It must be both present and invisible, deeply integrated and able to travel.
In 2026, Vendy reached the finalist group for South Summit Madrid’s Fintech & Insurtech competition. The milestone put an international stage around an idea rooted in a common African transaction: a customer, a merchant and a chat window. It also showed how far the ambition had widened. A Nigerian business might be discovered by a customer abroad, complete the order in WhatsApp and receive payment through infrastructure designed for that very conversation.
The most useful lesson in Disu’s story is not that every business needs a WhatsApp strategy. It is that behavior is infrastructure too. People had already decided where they wanted to talk, ask, bargain and buy. Vendy’s task was to stop insisting that the final step take place somewhere else.
A checkout page is a destination. A payment inside a conversation is a verb. Disu has spent a career learning what makes financial software dependable. Now he is trying to make that dependability casual - the sort of thing a customer can use without pausing to admire it. If Vendy succeeds, the cleverest part of the transaction may be the part no one mentions after saying, “Paid.”