A new study by Briter, conducted under GIZ's AI Made in Africa initiative, pulls back the curtain on a question that keeps African AI founders up at night: who is actually going to pay for this?
The numbers tell an interesting story. Some 88% of the businesses surveyed sell to other companies, 62% target individual consumers, and 44% work with governments. Those figures overlap because many startups are not picking one lane. They are deliberately serving multiple markets at once, which turns out to be less about ambition and more about survival.
Agriculture is a good place to see this logic in action. A company building weather intelligence tools might offer affordable forecasts to smallholder farmers while selling more sophisticated data packages to agribusinesses or public institutions. The underlying technology stays the same. What shifts is the customer, the service tier, and the price point.
In markets where purchasing power varies enormously from one customer segment to the next, that kind of flexibility is not a nice-to-have. For many founders, it is the thing that separates a genuinely interesting product from one that can actually pay its own bills.
The real question now is whether this multi-market approach can hold as these companies scale, or whether the pressure to focus will eventually force a choice.
Originally published by African Business.