Building Divisi · Across Africa
A reliable electricity supply. Paved streets with real addresses. A bank account. Fast, uncapped internet. Rainfall that follows the calendar. I build production systems for markets where those assumptions do not hold — prepaid vending across a footprint of 600,000 smart meters, freight matching in Lagos, and now Divisi, a farming companion in the hands of smallholders across Sub-Saharan Africa.
What I am building now
Most agricultural advice is written for someone else’s field. Divisi is calibrated to yours: your exact plot, your soil, your rainfall, your season. Free, on the phone you already own, and named for the Shona charm that protects a farmer’s land.
Free — no trial, no card, no selling farmer data. divisi.africa →
Free on the web, no app needed
The through-line
Most people working on developing-market technology come at it from one direction: they are engineers, or they are founders, or they are researchers. The gaps between those three are where the failures live — good products nobody can fund, funded programmes with no working software, rigorous studies nobody ever builds from.
I have spent over seven years covering all three. Divisi is where they converge.
01
Prepaid vending across a national footprint of 600,000 smart meters. A messaging and booking-state platform for 200,000 travellers a year. Freight matching in Lagos. The work runs from MODBUS and DLMS on the meter, through PostGIS and RabbitMQ, out to a hybrid app running on a five-year-old Android phone — and the constraints at one end quietly decide what is possible at the other.
02
I co-founded truQ in Lagos and wrote its first line of code as CTO. It has since drawn $470K+ from Techstars, Google’s Black Founders Fund and V8 Capital. Building here means shipping the rails and the business together — pricing, payment partners, keeping enough drivers available, and how long a regulator is willing to wait — and most of what I know about sequencing those, I learned from getting the order wrong first.
03
Springer-published on Harare’s informal manufacturing economy; a postgraduate diploma in Development Finance from Stellenbosch, with distinctions in financial analysis and project appraisal, financing for development, and monitoring & evaluation. It matters because the buyers in these markets are often donors, ministries and outgrower schemes — and they fund what they can appraise.
Selected work
Founder
A personalised smart-farming companion giving smallholder farmers the decision support that commercial agriculture takes for granted — crop advice, planting calendars and 7-day weather calibrated to each farmer’s exact GPS-pinned plot, in Android and iOS apps that work offline.
Co-founder & CTO
An on-demand logistics platform connecting anyone who needs to move something with the nearest available vehicle. I built and ran the entire technical stack — geospatial matching, three client apps, payments and the dashboards operations ran the business on.
Senior Developer
Maintained TinCan, the messaging and booking-state system behind every customer touchpoint for a tour operator moving 200,000+ travellers a year across 100+ destinations, and led the systems integration for the National Geographic Expeditions partnership.
Software Developer
Built the Android point-of-sale software and progressive web apps powering prepaid electricity, water and utility vending across a 600,000+ smart-meter footprint — from the MODBUS protocol on the wall to the payment on the phone.
Recognition
Awards are a weak signal on their own. These are listed because in each case a panel with nothing invested in the outcome examined the work and the numbers behind it.
2023
truQ won the debut TC Startup Battlefield at TechCabal’s Moonshot conference, taking the ₦2.5m prize against nine other startups, and was named a recipient of the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund. Both came after my tenure as founding CTO.
2022
The company I co-founded joined Techstars, Africa’s most active startup investor, contributing to $470K+ raised to date.
2021
truQ took the new-business award at the Wharton Africa Business Forum’s New Venture Competition while I was CTO.
2020
truQ secured $50,000 from the Growth Lab accelerator managed by V8 Capital Partners, having bootstrapped since launch.
2018
Led the team that built a credit-scoring engine for the informal sector using mobile-money transaction data — scoring the creditworthiness of traders with no bank statement, no payslip and no collateral, from the only financial trail they leave.
2017
For a computer-vision system for automated driver-behaviour monitoring and access control, built for developing-country road conditions. The same vision pipeline was then put to work counting and classifying traffic for Traffic Impact Assessments in Harare, including the Eastgate Market study.
2014
A second-year project: a health-advising interface device on a PIC18F4550 microcontroller, retrofitted into a modified digital scale, replacing the paper registers on the dining halls. Students scanned an ID barcode to verify residency and got BMI-based health advice on the way in. The university’s Department of Accommodation and Catering Services adopted the access-control system and rolled it out across campus.
Published
Book chapter · Springer
Mazongonda, S.S., Chikutukutu, I. & Chirisa, I. (2024). In Chirisa, I. & Matamanda, A.R. (eds), Urban Infrastructure in Zimbabwe, The Urban Book Series, Springer Cham.
Using GIS mapping and field surveys, we built a geo-database of Harare’s informal manufacturing sector to analyse clustering, accessibility and service provision. The findings show spatial agglomeration shaped by inadequate infrastructure, limited formal planning and informal governance — and argue that geo-databases are a practical decision-support tool for integrating informal manufacturers into urban economies.
Book · co-author
Ibrahim, P. & Chikutukutu, I.T. (2019). Independently published. ISBN 978-1080115846.
A study of how the world’s largest companies were actually constructed — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Airbnb, Tesla and SpaceX, alongside African and Asian cases including Dangote Group and Econet Wireless — reduced to the structural rules that recur across them.
In the press
TechCabal
Logistics company truQ bags ₦2.5 million as TC Startup Battlefield winner
October 2023
Technext
truQ bags ₦2.5 million as TC Startup Battlefield winner
October 2023
Disrupt Africa
On-demand logistics startup truQ sees quick uptake since Lagos launch
December 2020
Techstars
Africa’s most active startup investor announces new investments in Africa
2022
Crunchbase
Isaac Chikutukutu — founder profile
Ongoing
Tracxn
truQ — company profile, founders and board of directors
Ongoing
Get in touch
What gets me out of bed: offline-first products that still work when the network does not. Geospatial and field-data systems. Metering and payment rails that have to clear on the first attempt. And the question most people find tedious and I find genuinely interesting — whether a development-facing product is fundable before a line of it is written. If you are working on any of that, I will make the time: advisory and board conversations, partnership discussions for Divisi, and selective senior engineering work.