Max Smith

On an extremely hot day in 2022, a group of entrepreneurs found themselves in a busy side street in Dakar, staring up a ladder in one of the capital’s little run-down shops. They climbed up the ladder to a little, stuffy attic filled with cartons, hunched down under the low-hanging ceiling, and sat next to a brands distributor on boxes filled with cosmetic products. Battling the scorching heat and sultry humidity, Max Smith told the distributor: “Welcome to the first intelligence platform on consumer goods,” while showing his iPad with dashboards for more than 2,000 products.

The sentiment of this anecdote is reflective of Lengo’s leitmotif and what drives this young, dynamic and tech savvy team: it’s time to stop guessing Africa. As the vast continent has been largely overlooked by investors and companies in various sectors, especially when it comes to FMCG products, the three entrepreneurs – Max Smith, Roger Xavier Macia, and Ismailia Seck –  set out on a journey to change that by providing data about a space that is extremely difficult to obtain.

And thus, Lengo AI was born. Lengo AI is the first data-driven operating system for informal retail in Africa. It aims to provide intelligence and highly actionable insights to FMCG brands coming from the thousands of corner shops that make up 90% of purchases across the continent. The software-as-a-service platform uses a hybrid approach of Lengo Eagles (field agents) and AI to connect retailers and FMCG companies with real-time performance data on the sales of products.

“Even as a tech company, it all starts in the streets to onboard corporate and shopkeeper clients,” Max explains. “Shopkeepers are at the heart of the social and economic fabric of African countries – yet, it’s hard to find a central source of information on products sold in these shops. 

What’s in it for the shopkeepers? Simply, more revenue. By joining the Lengo Club, shopkeepers can increase their revenues by benefiting from insights on customer behaviors, alerts on new products and a loyalty point system. 

On the corporate end, it helps local companies in the FMCG sector optimize their resources, and provides purchasing behavior data to international companies aiming to invest in Africa.

So how did this dream team come together? Xavier and Max were friends who had embarked on different career paths. During Xavier’s time at Jumia in Senegal, he was the youngest CCO of the company and had done his part in proving that there is a large retail portfolio that was often overlooked in Africa. On the other end, Max had experience leading market research in Cameroon, Guinea, Togo and Senegal. 

Once they were certain about how they truly wanted to have a groundbreaking impact on the ecosystem of African shopkeepers, they looked for a top-tier talent to handle the company’s tech portion. That is when they met Ismaila, who has a Ph.D in deep learning methods and worked extensively on adversarial image classification for autonomous vehicles and Natural Language Processing for African languages. Previously based in France, he was immediately sold on Lengo’s idea and took a plane back to Senegal two days after he had talked to Max and Xavier to join the company as CTO. Ismaila saw Lengo as the perfect opportunity to apply his technical skills to solve real-life problems and truly have an impact in his home country. 

Today, Lengo AI has mapped out over 30,000 corner shops. The company was the first to fully  map out corner shops selling FMCG products in Dakar, and is in the process of mapping out an additional six cities. In the next few years, Lengo plans to provide new and exciting products to its customers and to roll out these solutions to new markets across Africa.

“When I met Max in 2022 in Dakar, I was immediately excited by what he was building. It was clear that we were working with a very special team working on a unique solution in one of the largest sectors in Africa,” said Aly El Shalakany, Managing Partner of Acasia Ventures. 

In 2023, Acasia Ventures led a pre-seed investment round in Lengo AI in an investment round co-led by Ventures Platform and joined by P1 Ventures, Launch Africa, Voltron Capital and a number of other VCs and angel investors.