Abacus – Building the first Africa’s Roboadvisory Investment Service

Launched in 2014 by Joel Macharia, Kevin Omwega, Abacus provides real-time data on equity, debt and derivative securities from the Nairobi Securities Exchange. This data is coupled with highly contextualised news, company reports, analytics tools, and data science tools for algorithm development.

Abacus is covering learning, deciding, investing managing beating down all of its competitors in the Market. With 10k users and 8 different partners across the market, Abacus is witnessing a 10% growth per month, this has led to a market valuation of 25 billion in Africa and 1.5 billion in Kenya.

The Abacus team is launching the first automated advisory service for trading on the Nairobi Stock Exchange in Kenya: Abacus is targeting not just investors in Kenya, but the Kenyan diaspora, which sends as much as $3 billion back to Kenya every year, more than what the country receives in foreign direct investment. “There’s a lot of money outside looking for places to go,” says Macharia. Today, Abacus has more than 7,000 users on the platform and hosts classes in Nairobi on investing.