Product — in development
Zaure
Business messaging for Nigerian SMEs. Encrypted by default, hosted in Nigeria, with bots, automations and AI agents that do actual work rather than sit in a sidebar. Business first — and perfectly usable for personal conversations, because for somebody running a small business the two were never cleanly separated anyway.
Zaure (Hausa: zaa‑uu‑ree) is the entrance hall of a traditional Hausa home — the room between the street and the private interior, where guests are received and where business is transacted. Not fully public, not fully private. A trader’s zaure is their shopfront, their meeting room and their back office at once. That is the product.
The problem
Most Nigerian small businesses already run on a messenger. Orders arrive in a group chat. Invoices are photographs. Payment confirmation is a forwarded screenshot. Customer enquiries, supplier coordination, staff scheduling and delivery tracking all share one undifferentiated thread, and the only search tool is scrolling.
It works, which is why nobody stops doing it. But nothing is structured, nothing is automated, the business’s entire customer record lives on a platform it does not control, and every year of history is one lost phone away from gone. The tooling that would fix this was built for companies with an IT department.
Familiar on purpose
Zaure is deliberately built to look and behave like the messengers people already use every day — WhatsApp, Telegram. The conversation list, the gestures, where things sit on screen: familiar by design, not by accident.
This is a strategic choice, not a lack of imagination. The thing standing between a Nigerian trader and better tooling is not features, it is switching cost. Asking somebody to learn new software in order to keep doing the job they are already doing is how good tools die unused. So the parts of Zaure that feel new should be the parts that genuinely are new — the structure, the automation, where the data lives. Everything else should need no explanation at all.
Three defaults
These are not tiers to upgrade into or settings to find. They are how the product ships.
- Built for how SMEs actually trade. Designed around the way business is really conducted here — in groups, in more than one language, on a mid‑range Android phone, on data that costs money. Not a Western team-collaboration tool with the prices converted.
- Encrypted by default. End‑to‑end encryption on, not offered as an option. No ad‑tech, no behavioural profiling, no sale of anything to brokers. A business’s pricing, supplier terms and customer list are not our inventory to monetise.
- Sovereign by design. Zaure will run on its own Matrix homeserver rather than on somebody else’s platform, and that homeserver will be hosted in Nigeria. This is not abstract: under the Nigeria Data Protection Act the business holding its customers’ data is the one with the obligation. Running that data through a foreign consumer platform makes it their problem, not the platform’s.
What it does
| Chats | Direct and group conversations, encrypted — with customers, staff and suppliers. |
|---|---|
| Spaces | Work separated into spaces instead of one endless thread: a space per team, per project, per branch, per supplier relationship. |
| Apps | Bots, extensions and agents as full participants in a conversation rather than an integration bolted on afterwards. |
Automation and agents
This is the part that makes Zaure more than a private messenger. A conversation is where a small business already does its work, so it is the right place to put the tooling — not a separate dashboard nobody opens.
Bots and agents participate in a chat the way a colleague would: they take an instruction, carry out a multi‑step task, and report back in the thread where the work is happening. The workflows we are building for are the ones SMEs run every day — taking an order through to a confirmed payment, issuing and chasing an invoice, answering a routine customer question, raising a purchase order, coordinating a delivery, keeping a record that can be searched afterwards.
Because extensions are first‑class, a business can automate the specific shape of its own operation rather than the shape a vendor assumed. This surface is under active development and is not finished; what ships at launch will be narrower than what is described here, and this page will say so.
Not in the first release
Updates — a broadcast surface for reaching customers with announcements, new stock, price changes and opening hours — is a commitment rather than a launch feature. It is deliberately deferred so the first release can be narrower and better. Three things that work beat four where one is an apology.
Why Matrix
Zaure is built on Matrix, an open, federated standard for real‑time communication with a published specification and several independent implementations. For a business that matters in a practical way: the protocol is not ours to hold hostage, the encryption is reviewed by people who do not work for us, and a company’s conversation history is not trapped in a format only we can read. A closed protocol would have been easier for us and worse for the people depending on it.
Status
In development, and genuinely early. Zaure has not been released on the App Store or Google Play, and no production homeserver is running yet — development is against a local instance. The commitments on this page describe how the product is being built and where it will be hosted, not a service you can sign up to today. When it ships, it will be announced here first.
If you run an SME and this describes a problem you have, we would rather hear from you now than after launch: contact@zerodaone.com. Support channels are at Zaure support.
Zaure is a product of ZERODAONE LTD (RC 9620327).