Ajua - originally founded as mSurvey in 2013 by Kenfield Griffith, a Barbadian-American entrepreneur who relocated to Nairobi - is a customer experience technology company that pivoted from mobile surveys to a comprehensive CX platform serving businesses across East Africa. The company's evolution from a single-product SMS tool to an enterprise platform illustrates both the opportunities and the strategic challenges facing B2B technology companies in Silicon Savannah.
Griffith arrived in Kenya after studying at MIT and working in technology in the United States, drawn by the energy of Nairobi's growing tech scene and the opportunity to build technology products for African markets. mSurvey launched as a mobile survey platform that allowed businesses to collect customer feedback via SMS - a straightforward product that leveraged Kenya's near-universal mobile phone penetration. Restaurants, banks, retailers, and service providers could send short surveys to customers after transactions, collecting satisfaction data that had previously required expensive call centres or physical questionnaires.
The SMS survey product gained traction quickly. Kenya's large FMCG companies, banks, and telecommunications firms became early clients, using mSurvey to gather customer insights at a scale and speed that traditional research methods could not match. The company processed millions of survey responses, generating a dataset of Kenyan consumer sentiment that was unique in the market. Griffith raised seed and Series A funding from investors including 500 Startups, FINCA Ventures, and the LGT Impact Ventures.
The pivot from mSurvey to Ajua in 2020 reflected Griffith's ambition to build a broader platform. Rather than competing as a survey tool - a commodity product vulnerable to cheaper alternatives - Ajua repositioned as an end-to-end customer experience management platform. The rebrand accompanied an expansion of the product suite to include customer feedback collection, sentiment analysis, loyalty programme management, and business analytics dashboards. The vision was to be the Qualtrics or Medallia of African enterprise - a platform that helped businesses understand and improve their customer relationships through data.
The rebranding was strategic but risky. Survey tools have clear value propositions and short sales cycles - a marketing manager can buy one with a modest budget. Enterprise CX platforms require longer sales cycles, deeper integration with client systems, and larger contracts. The Kenyan enterprise technology market, while growing, was still small - the number of companies willing to pay premium prices for sophisticated CX software was limited compared to markets in North America or Europe.
Ajua's experience highlighted a structural challenge in Kenyan B2B technology: building enterprise software companies in a market where potential clients are relatively few, price-sensitive, and accustomed to using free or low-cost tools. The addressable market for enterprise CX software in Kenya was measured in hundreds of potential clients, not thousands - a constraint that made the unit economics of enterprise sales difficult to sustain. International expansion across Africa could theoretically enlarge the market, but each new country brought different business cultures, regulatory environments, and competitive landscapes.
Griffith's journey from mSurvey to Ajua also illustrated the identity questions facing Kenyan tech companies: whether to remain a focused, profitable tool serving a defined need, or to pursue the platform ambitions that venture investors rewarded with higher valuations. The tension between these two paths - sustainability versus scale - defined many of the strategic debates in Nairobi's startup ecosystem.
See Also
Sources
- Jackson, Tom. "mSurvey Rebrands to Ajua, Pivots to Full Customer Experience Platform." Disrupt Africa, 2020.
- Bright, Jake. "Kenfield Griffith on Building Enterprise Software for Africa." TechCrunch, 2019.
- Mulupi, Dinfin. "How mSurvey Is Using SMS to Revolutionise Customer Research in Kenya." How We Made It in Africa, 2016.
- 500 Startups. "mSurvey: Mobile Customer Feedback for African Enterprise." Portfolio Case Study, 2017.