RetailLoop

Situation

African retail runs on fragmented, incompatible systems. A merchant uses a POS terminal, a separate ecommerce storefront, a manual inventory spreadsheet, and coordinates suppliers over WhatsApp. There is no unified view across any of it. When stock runs out online but sits on a shelf in-store, nobody knows until a customer complains. Decisions get made on stale, disconnected data.

Task

Build a retail intelligence platform that connects these fragmented systems into a single real-time decision layer without replacing the tools merchants already use. Merchants in emerging markets will not switch software; the platform has to sit between their existing tools, not replace them.

Action

• Designed a connector-first architecture where each integration (POS, ecommerce, inventory) is an isolated module. Adding a new source does not touch core logic.
• Chose event-driven sync over batch ETL so merchants get real-time stock visibility instead of yesterday's numbers.
• Built offline resilience into the sync layer: the system queues events locally when connectivity drops and syncs when it returns, treating unreliable internet infrastructure as a first-class constraint.
• Built and shipped the platform from zero: first line of code, first integration, first retailer onboarded.
• Scaled the engineering organisation from 0 to 20 across 3 product teams with career ladders, hiring rubrics, and quarterly planning cycles.
• Built AI agent orchestration on AWS Bedrock with five domain agents (inventory, demand, orders, cost, pricing) using per-tenant pgvector RAG retrieval and cross-session memory.

Result

• 1,500+ merchants on the platform across multiple regions.
• 99.9% uptime sustained on core transaction paths via a multi-tenant real-time event pipeline ingesting 4,000+ events per day.
• €120K per quarter in overstock losses prevented by the AI signals platform.
• 60% p95 latency improvement across migrated services through systematic profiling.
• 24% company revenue growth from the digital transformation initiative.
• Sub-2-second real-time sync latency across all connected sources.