Isaac Tichafa Chikutukutu

The long version

I grew up in Zimbabwe and studied Business Studies and Computing Science at the University of Zimbabwe — a combination that looked unfocused at the time and has turned out to be the whole point. What I actually do is notice a gap and work out whether something can exist in it. Writing the code is how I find out.

My second-year project, in 2014, was a health-advising interface device on a PIC18F4550 microcontroller, retrofitted into a modified digital scale and wired to a computer over USB. The dining halls ran on paper registers. A student stepped on the scale, scanned their ID barcode, was verified as resident, and got BMI-based health advice on the way in. The university’s Department of Accommodation and Catering Services adopted the access-control half and deployed it across campus. It taught me the most useful thing I know about adoption: a system gets used when it slots into a queue people are already standing in.

In 2017 I built a computer-vision system to monitor driver behaviour and control access on roads that no commercial traffic model was written for. It won Undergraduate Innovator of the Year from the Research Council of Zimbabwe, and was then put to work counting traffic for impact assessments in Harare, including the Eastgate Market study. The lesson stuck: in these markets the data you need usually does not exist yet, and building the instrument is half the job.

The next year I led the team that won the Mobile Financial Services Hackathon with a credit-scoring engine built on mobile-money data — scoring traders who have no payslip and no collateral, from the only financial trail they leave. Same lesson, different economy.

What followed was over seven years of building the unglamorous middle layer. At netVendor I built the Android point-of-sale software and smart-meter integrations behind prepaid electricity and water vending across a national footprint of 600,000 smart meters — the point at which a low-income South African household actually buys electricity. At truQ, which I co-founded in Lagos after meeting Williams Fatayo and Foluso Ojo at the World Youth Forum Startup Lab in Egypt, I wrote the entire stack: geospatial matching, three client apps, payments, and the dashboards operations ran on. At Momint I ran backend engineering for an NFT marketplace through its highest-profile drops. At FinMeUp I architected the backend that carried a financial-education platform through its growth phase. At G Adventures I maintained the messaging and booking-state platform behind every customer touchpoint for a tour operator moving 200,000 travellers a year.

In parallel I kept the research going — co-authoring a Springer chapter mapping Harare’s informal manufacturing sector, and taking a postgraduate diploma in Development Finance at Stellenbosch, so I could argue for this work in the language funders actually use.

Since November 2025 I have been full-time on Divisi: a personalised smart-farming companion for smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa. It is the first thing I have built that needs all of it at once — the offline-first engineering, the geospatial data, the payments and ledger thinking, the field-research discipline, and the ability to structure it so an outgrower scheme or a development funder can appraise it. It is free to farmers, and it stays that way, because the programmes that need the agronomic outcomes pay for it — not the farmers, and not advertisers.

If you want to see the thing rather than read about it: a free check of what grows best on your farm, and the open reference library we publish for farmers and extension officers — crop guides, pest guides, disease guides, a glossary of the words and measures farmers actually use and season and climate insights. The name itself is a Shona word for a charm that protects the land and multiplies the harvest.