A letter from the founder

We started OpenCrate with a simple and audacious belief — that the best businesses haven’t been built yet, and most of them will come from Africa.

I’m writing this not as a press release or a pitch, but as a note — the kind you’d send a friend who asked, honestly, what you were building and why. So here it is, plainly: OpenCrate is a holding company. We build and back focused, high-quality businesses across categories we genuinely care about. We are not a venture firm. We are not an accelerator. We are a builder.

The thesis is uncomplicated. Most of the world’s great companies are still ahead of us, and an outsized share of them will be born in places that the rest of the world has historically underestimated. We’re Lagos by gravity, London by orbit, and global by intent. We build for the African operator, the diaspora dreamer, the creator who refuses to wait for permission, and the customer who has always deserved better.

Some of what we’re building is already in the world. If you’ve ever tried to book a barber in Lagos, or a nail tech in Accra, or a braider in Houston, you know how broken the experience can be — for the customer and for the small business owner. That’s why we built Lavandr, a booking and scheduling platform for salons, barbers, nail techs and every appointment-based service business that has been quietly running on WhatsApp and goodwill for years. Lavandr is live now, and the businesses on it are growing faster than we expected.

Logistics is the other story we keep running into. African commerce — digital and physical, domestic and cross-border — is bottlenecked by shipping. Sellers lose customers because they can’t promise a delivery date. Buyers lose trust because parcels disappear. We built OgaShipper to be the quiet infrastructure underneath all of that — the rails that make shipping simple for African businesses, whether they’re moving a package across Lagos or across an ocean. It’s live, and we’re building toward the day “ship it” means the same thing here as it does anywhere else.

Then there are the businesses we’re building because the world is changing faster than the tools available to it. Coconut is a social commerce tool for retail brands in Africa to sell internationally — because African creativity has always travelled well, but the storefronts haven’t. Coconut launches in May 2026, and the waitlist is open.

For the diaspora — the millions of Africans who carry home in their chest no matter where they live — we’re building Tabara. It’s the world’s first super app for Africans abroad: a way to connect, to shop from home, to send money, to find an African restaurant anywhere in the world. One app for the small, important things that make distance feel less like distance. Launching Q3 2026.

And then there is the company I’m least able to describe in a sentence, which is probably a good sign. Lorkie is the world’s first luck-increasing platform. Using AI to help anyone systematically increase their luck. Strange to say out loud. Stranger to build. We think it might be one of the most important things we ever do. Launching Q3 2026.

Of course, the products only matter if the storytelling around them is honest and alive. That’s why we built Ca&Ca — short for Cavemen & Captions Agency — an AI-first agency that builds and ships products, brands, and creative marketing for brands globally. Ca&Ca is live, and a lot of what you see across our portfolio is shaped by the team there.

Two more for the creators. The economy is no longer organised around companies; it’s organised around people who make things. We’re building Socious, a swipe-based platform where creators, influencers and brands collaborate (Q4 2026), and Suya, a complete personal platform for creators to manage their entire business and life. Suya launches in June 2026. Both of these are love letters to the people who taught us that distribution is a skill, not an accident.

The last two are not products. They are places. BuildCamp is a six-month residency hacker house for anyone building anything — apps, products, brands, films, the lot. We open the first residential home in Q4 2026. And CRW — Creative Retail Week — is the world’s first proper creative retail festival, a yearly gathering for everyone who loves physical, beautifully-made things. The next edition is in November 2026.

You may have noticed there is no grand strategy slide tying all of this together, no neat “synergy map.” That’s on purpose. The thread isn’t a category — it’s a standard. Each of these businesses has to be the kind of thing we would use ourselves, talk about unprompted, and be proud of in ten years. That is the only filter.

We are not done. We are barely started. If something here speaks to you — as a customer, a collaborator, a hire, or a fellow builder — we would love to hear from you. Write to us. Try the products. Tell us what we’re missing. Bring us the business that should exist and doesn’t.

With every intention of meaning it,