“Can you imagine money delivered to your doorstep, just like a newspaper to enlighten your daily morning read? Or the milkman, dropping off …”
Senditoo Overview
Senditoo (www.senditoo.com), formerly Ozaremit, is an international value remittance service for diaspora communities to support family and friends back home. Senditoo has grown into a recognizable African brand that you can use to send money, airtime, groceries, and pay bills for people back home, no matter where you are in the world. It is essentially an international remittance service aimed primarily at people living in the diaspora. Takwana Tyaranini and his Guinean colleague Ibrahim Soumano, who also serves as CEO, co-founded it. It has three investors, Jan Petzel, Romain Girbal, and Thibault Launay, who also serve as advisors. Horion Digital is a key technology partner for them. Senditoo’s website has more information.
Who is Takwana Tyaranini
Tyaranini was born in 1984 near Masvingo and raised in Kadoma, Rimuka. According to his LinkedIn profile, “I am a Co-Founder of a very cool airtime transfer startup Senditoo” (www.senditoo.com). We created a platform to help everyone stay connected with their family and friends, as well as to send instant credit to mobile phones all over the world. I played a key role in the development of this innovative service and brand, which provides one of the most extensive coverage with over 400 mobile operators worldwide and a reach of 4.5 billion prepaid users. Start-ups, entrepreneurship, financial services, marketing, brand strategy, marketing management, leadership, advertising, creative, driving return on marketing investment, trust, design, people development, product management, team development, and capability building.”
How Senditoo Came To Be?
Takwana Tyaranini can best be described as a circumstantial entrepreneur. A few years ago Tyaranini was working as a mental health practitioner in the United Kingdom. This is a profession that he undertook for a good 15 years but unfortunately lost his job. After losing his job he decided to pursue a different path. He set out to work on an idea that he had mused on for a while.
“I lost my job and found myself never wanting to depend on employment. That’s when my business partner Mr Soumano insisted we form a 50-50 partnership and as they say, the rest is history,” he said.
“For many people living and working away from their home countries especially in our native continent of Africa one of their greatest needs is to stay in touch with their relatives and friends and to be up to speed with important developments back home.”
That clearly shows us that he realized there was a need back in Africa for people to keep in touch with their loved ones in the diaspora.
How His Friend Contributed To Company Birth And Growth
Sometime in April in the year 2015, his colleague, Ibrahim Soumano, visited his home country to see his relatives, in Guinea. He was stunned when he saw the reaction of his relatives and their neighbours when he gave them mobile airtime vouchers. What happened after this incident is best described by what Takwana Tyaranini said:
“Seeing the impact made by that small gift of a few mobile minutes was a light bulb moment for Ibrahim and when he returned to the UK we immediately tucked into the idea. The result was the birth of Senditoo, which we initially named Ozaremit before rebranding and launching it with a new API that allows us to develop new business-to-business partnerships.”
How Instrumental Senditoo Has Been To Zimbabwe
Senditoo has been revolutionizing the banking system in Zimbabwe. Currently it’s slowly becoming a dominant money transfer firm not only in Zimbabwe but across Africa. The purpose of the services provided by Senditoo was to enable migrants to send instant mobile phone credit to their loved ones in various parts of the world.
For Tyaranini and Soumano, their simple ambition will always be to harness technology to provide practical solutions to society’s problems.
“With Senditoo, we’ve found a way to keep the African conversation flowing in three easy steps: enter your number on our platform, make a payment and credit is received instantly,” Tyaranini said.
In a bid to outsmart their competitors the company has initiated a home cash delivery service.
