Ajua Acquires Rate My Service

Ajua, a leading African customer service platform, has acquired Rate My Service (RMS), a Kenyan company that helps businesses improve how they treat customers and employees. Ajua is now poised to amplify its influence with an even sharper understanding of local markets, bringing it closer to its goal of becoming Africa’s biggest customer experience company. By combining RMS’s tools and knowledge of local markets with Ajua’s existing services, the company can now offer better, more personalised solutions, enhancing its clients’ ability to scale.

This marks Ajua’s second major acquisition following its 2021 purchase of WayaWaya. It illustrates an aggressive expansion strategy and their commitment to building the most comprehensive CX platform on the continent. The merger brings together two influential platforms with complementary strengths – Ajua’s broad regional reach and proven real-time feedback capabilities, and RMS’s deep local expertise and innovative feedback solutions tailored specifically for African markets.

Congratulations on Ajua’s merger with Rate My Services. It is a power move for Ajua. What’s your vision for this market?

Nyasha Mutsekwana, CEO, Ajua: We are trying to build a $10 million ARR business over the next five years. To do that, we said we needed to solidify our base here in Kenya and then expand into West and East Africa. Our vision is that we have a strong product and a strong customer base that can leapfrog us into the rest of the regions.

What’s the new company called now that it’s merged, and will you be changing the name or rebranding?

It’s still going to be Ajua. We are absorbing RMS. RMS will still be a product line, and the RMS customers will still use RMS. However, if they do want to use Ajua or any of the features or functionality, it will be possible. What we’re going to do over the next couple of months is introduce a roadmap that builds into one plan. At some point, we’re going to merge the platforms to give us a stronger capability. Akshay Shah (the former RMS CEO and Founder) will be joining us as our CTO. He will be running the product capability. Of course, I’m a commercial guy, so I will stick with the selling. Aside from that, his team is now joining our engineering team and our customer success team as well.

You are each working with your respective strengths.

Yes, we are. Completely.

What are you looking at as your biggest priority over the next year?

AI is a big priority for all our customers. Understanding how they can use AI in their business matters. And what we’re trying to do is be a little bit more pragmatic about AI, contemplating it as an enhancement that they will get today rather than just blow everything up because of hype.

You have two separate teams. How will you be merging the people, the processes and the tech stack?

Fortunately enough, RMS already run on AWS, and because we’re in the AWS marketplace, what we’re going to do is just bring RMS into our platform. We’ll be running off AWS together. The tech stacks are not a big issue. Interestingly enough, his engineering team and our engineering team are both trying to get to gold jackets in the AWS certification. So we’re all driving to the same goal: to build technology that is great for our customers.

At which point did you identify RMS as a possible acquisition?

I joined Ajua in November 2024, and after having looked at where we were trying to go and what we needed to do, I went to the board and explained that if we partnered with someone, we could start looking at something. There were a couple of other organisations that we thought about, but we felt so aligned with how Akshay has built his business. He bootstrapped it for the last four years and has built a really strong customer base. We listen to our customers too. There are customers who left us to go to RMS and are now coming back to us. When we saw that kind of synergy, we thought this was the best place to start.

Can you give me any numbers?

Unfortunately, we can’t share numbers. But I can give you a good understanding of how we’ve structured the deal. A lot of it is equity replacement because of Ajua’s valuation. We’re a bigger business than they are. It is swallowing up RMS from an equity perspective. That’s how we’ve done the deal.