We're Building the Future of Sales

KobotAI began as a side experiment to solve one of the most frustrating truths about business — most leads do not fail because they were not generated, but because they were not followed up.

While working with an entrepreneur support organization, TVC Labs, I used to follow up with founders to help investors keep track of the growth or decline of these startups. But following up with 50+ founders at the same time, each with different conversations, was hard — really hard.

As an engineer at heart, I looked for tools that could make it easier. But nothing solved the problem with the level of specificity it required. So I built my own: a Google Sheet powered by Apps Script for mail merge, adding a bit of context manually for each message. It wasn't perfect, but it worked — and soon, my team adopted it. They still use it today.

I wanted to scale it, so I tried deploying it as an official Google Add-on. But Google would not verify it because it used restricted scopes that were nearly impossible to refactor within Apps Script. After months of email back and forth with Google's verification team, I finally got tired and decided to open-source the project in 2023. (Here's the linked post I wrote about that.)

That experience planted the seed for KobotAI. In early 2024, while helping small digital businesses manage their online sales channels, I noticed the same pattern again: hundreds of inquiries sitting unreplied in Gmail inboxes, WhatsApp chats left cold, and sales that quietly died from silence. That problem felt too human to ignore.

So I started building an AI system that could behave like a diligent sales assistant — one that remembers, follows up, and keeps leads warm across all your channels. We began with Gmail, building our first working follow-up system using the Gmail API. Every reply it sent, every re-engaged lead, every "Hey, just checking in again" message felt like a win against lost opportunity.

Today, KobotAI is expanding that idea into something bigger — a complete follow-up and nurturing layer for modern African businesses. We're not just helping founders get leads. We're helping them build relationships that last.