Oze: AI-Powered Finance for African MSMEs

a n
Dec 15, 2025
11 min read

Introduction

Oze is a Ghana-born fintech startup that uses data and AI to help micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) across Africa run better businesses and gain access to finance. It began in Accra in 2018 as a simple mobile tool that allowed entrepreneurs to record daily sales, expenses, debts, and inventory on their phones instead of in paper notebooks. Over time, those basic records became the foundation for something much more powerful: a full digital “business operating system” that generates financial statements, highlights cash flow trends, and feeds into credit scoring models that banks can use to lend safely to small businesses that previously had no formal financial history.

In many African countries, MSMEs make up most of the private sector but are stuck in an informal, cash-based reality. Part of the reason MSMEs struggle to prove performance is that a large share of work in many African cities is informal, so transactions and records don’t naturally flow through formal systems.

**Informal employment makes up a large share of jobs in many African cities**

This is the gap Oze targets: it turns daily, informal business activity into consistent digital records that owners can use to manage cash flow and lenders can use to underwrite credit. Business owners may work hard and have loyal customers, yet struggle to prove their performance to banks. Oze tackles this gap directly. The app creates a continuous stream of structured business data that can be analyzed in real time—both to give owners actionable insights and to help lenders evaluate risk. Oze’s platform, which now operates in multiple African markets beyond Ghana, connects three layers: the MSME owner using the app, the AI models that transform raw transactions into risk and growth signals, and the financial institutions that need reliable, low-cost ways to lend at scale.

As it has grown, Oze has moved from being “just” a bookkeeping app into a broader infrastructure player. It now powers loan origination and management for banks and digital lenders through its Lending Management System (LMS), effectively sitting in the middle of a two-sided market: on one side, under-served MSMEs; on the other side, banks and fintechs searching for profitable SME portfolios but lacking data. This makes Oze an important case study for how African AI and fintech can work together to formalize informal economies, close the SME credit gap, and unlock new growth across the continent.

**Access-to-credit gap is large across developing regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa**

Why Oze Matters

MSME backbone of African economies: MSMEs account for the majority of businesses and a large share of employment and GDP across sub-Saharan Africa, yet many cannot access affordable credit because they lack formal records. Oze directly targets this structural gap by turning informal daily activity into bank-ready data.
Digitizing informal business activity: Instead of relying on paper ledgers or memory, entrepreneurs use Oze to record sales, expenses, receivables, and inventory on their phones. This digitization is the first step toward formalizing the business and making its performance visible both to the owner and to potential lenders.
AI-enabled credit scoring for the “unbanked”: Oze’s models analyze thousands of data points—transaction histories, volatility of cash flows, repayment behavior, seasonal patterns—to generate alternative credit scores for MSMEs that traditional credit bureaus ignore. This allows banks and fintech partners to extend collateral-free loans where they previously saw only risk.
Improved business performance, not just access to loans: Oze doesn’t only connect firms to finance; it also improves how they are run. The app produces dashboards and reports that show profit trends, margin erosion, cash flow gaps, and slow-moving inventory. Oze reports that the vast majority of businesses that actively use the platform for many months are either growing or profitable—showing that better decisions follow better data.
Lower borrowing costs for small businesses: In many African markets, informal lenders and predatory credit schemes charge extremely high interest rates. By giving banks enough data to underwrite MSMEs more confidently, Oze helps shift borrowers onto safer, cheaper, formal credit products, reducing their cost of capital and freeing up cash for reinvestment.
Data infrastructure for African AI: Oze’s aggregated dataset—millions of SME transactions across sectors and countries—has long-term value beyond any single loan. It contributes to building a more representative data layer for African AI, where algorithms are trained on local patterns of spending, seasonality, and customer behavior rather than imported assumptions from other regions.

Founders

Oze’s story is closely tied to its co-founder and CEO, Meghan McCormick, whose background bridges grassroots development, analytics, and elite business training. Meghan first encountered the challenges African entrepreneurs face as a Peace Corps Community Economic Development Volunteer in Guinea, where she worked directly with small business owners and young people trying to launch enterprises. She founded and led Dare to Innovate, one of Francophone West Africa’s most active entrepreneurship accelerators, designing programs that trained and financed youth-led businesses.

On the ground, she repeatedly saw the same pattern: entrepreneurs worked long hours but lacked basic financial visibility. Records were scattered across notebooks, margins were unclear, and banks refused to recognize these informal ledgers as a basis for lending. At the same time, she saw that when people were given even modest tools and training, they could radically change their prospects. That combination of frustration (at the system) and optimism (about what entrepreneurs could do) shaped her long-term interest in building scalable solutions rather than one-off projects.

After the Peace Corps, Meghan deepened her technical and strategic skills, studying at MIT Sloan and Harvard Kennedy School (MBA / MPA), and working in innovation strategy and consulting. This gave her exposure to advanced analytics, product design, and how large organizations think about risk and scale. She began “commuting” between Cambridge and West Africa, testing early versions of what would become Oze while still in graduate school. The idea was always the same: give entrepreneurs a simple, mobile-first tool they will actually use, and then use that data to unlock credit and support from institutions.

Meghan co-founded Oze with Dave Emnett, who also served in the Peace Corps in West Africa and later took on roles in finance and analytics. Dave’s experience running operations and managing finances for entrepreneurship programs in Benin and Guinea made him a strong counterpart—focused on the “plumbing”: data pipelines, operations, and the financial logic behind the product. Together, they form a founding team that deeply understands both sides of the problem: the realities of African MSMEs at the micro level and the expectations of investors and banks at the macro level. That dual fluency is a key reason they are a good fit to build a cross-border, AI-driven SME finance platform.

Inception and Development

The initial spark for Oze came from crisis. During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa (2014–2015), Meghan and her colleagues at Dare to Innovate were asking how to help entrepreneurs survive not just that crisis, but the next one. They realized that one of the biggest weaknesses in the ecosystem was the absence of reliable, up-to-date financial data for small businesses. Without that, owners were making blind decisions and banks had no basis to lend. The question evolved from “how do we train more entrepreneurs?” to “how do we capture and use the data that makes their businesses visible and credible?” Oze was conceived as the answer.

Meghan moved to Ghana and began building a beta version of the app around 2017–2018. Early pilots were extremely hands-on: the team recruited business owners in markets and via WhatsApp groups, onboarded them one by one, and watched how they used (or didn’t use) the app. Most of these businesses had never used a digital accounting tool before. This period was full of experimentation and failure—features that the founders assumed would be popular, like multi-user accounts for staff and partners, turned out to be low priority, while “simple” features like professional-looking invoices emerged as surprisingly powerful value drivers.

From this experimentation, Oze’s model started to crystallize:

Core app as the habit builder: The free or low-cost bookkeeping app is the entry point, helping entrepreneurs get used to tracking daily transactions and seeing a basic P&L and cash-flow picture.
Analytics and coaching as the differentiator: Over time, Oze added reports, business tips, and coaching programs that leverage the data to help owners understand what’s really driving (or hurting) their performance.
Credit as the unlock: Once enough history is built, Oze’s credit models and lending partners come into play, offering working capital loans, inventory finance, and other products based on the business’s actual cash flows

As traction grew in Ghana, Oze raised an oversubscribed $3 million pre-Series A round in 2022, led by Speedinvest and others, to scale its presence in Ghana and Nigeria and deepen its financial services offering. By then, over 100,000 business owners had signed up to use Oze, and the company had begun to position itself not only as an app for entrepreneurs but also as a data and lending infrastructure provider for African financial institutions.

In 2025, Oze secured additional strategic funding from investors including Visa and DEG (the German development finance institution) to scale up its Lending Management System (LMS) and expand across more African markets. The LMS allows banks and micro-lenders to use Oze’s data and scoring engine to originate, monitor, and manage SME loans at lower cost and risk.

**Oze UI example: eligibility + ‘Apply for loan’ (LMS-related flow)**

Impact & Importance

Scale of reach: Oze has been used by tens of thousands of MSMEs, with reported figures around or above 125,000 registered business owners on the platform as of the early- to mid-2020s. This scale demonstrates strong demand for simple, mobile-first business tools among African entrepreneurs.
Business performance uplift: Internal and third-party reporting indicates that the overwhelming majority of businesses actively using Oze over several months are either growing or profitable, suggesting that consistent data tracking and analytics translate into better decisions and outcomes.
Loans unlocked and interest saved: Through its platform and partners, Oze has facilitated millions of dollars in loans to micro and small businesses, often at interest rates dramatically lower than informal lenders. Analyses of Oze’s portfolio suggest that by shifting borrowers from high-cost informal credit to more affordable formal products, the platform helps entrepreneurs avoid very large amounts of unnecessary interest expenses over time.
Women’s economic inclusion: A significant share of Oze’s users are women-owned businesses. By providing them with tools to formalize finances and then access loans, Oze contributes to greater gender equity in entrepreneurship—helping women grow their enterprises, build assets, and support their families and communities.
Proof that SME finance can be both impact-driven and profitable: Oze’s model shows investors and banks that lending to MSMEs does not have to mean taking uncontrolled risk. With better data and AI-driven scoring, default rates can be managed and SME portfolios can be profitable. This changes the narrative around SME lending in Africa from charity to smart business, attracting more mainstream capital into the sector.
Global recognition as an impact innovator: Inclusion in high-profile impact lists and acceleration programs (such as Norrsken’s Impact 100) has put Oze on the radar of global investors, donors, and policymakers, reinforcing its position as a leading example of how African startups can combine AI, fintech, and development outcomes at scale.

Challenges & Limitations

Driving behavior change among entrepreneurs: Convincing busy market traders and small shop owners to consistently enter every sale and expense into an app is difficult. Building that daily habit—especially among users with low digital literacy or limited time—is an ongoing challenge and can limit data quality and model performance.
Monetization in low-income segments: Many MSMEs are extremely price-sensitive, and a large share operate with thin margins. While they value the app, getting them to pay meaningful subscription fees, on time, and through payment rails that often fail (e.g., low mobile money balances) is a constraint. Oze has had to experiment with pricing, bundling, and partner-subsidized models to make the economics work.
Dependence on partners for lending scale: Oze does not hold a banking license itself; it depends on banks, microfinance institutions, and digital lenders to actually disburse loans. If partners are slow to adopt new models, risk-averse, or constrained by regulation, Oze’s ability to expand lending volume can be bottlenecked—even if its data and algorithms show strong performance.
Regulatory complexity across markets: Each African country has its own rules around data privacy, digital lending, and KYC/AML (Know Your Customer / Anti-Money Laundering). Expanding from Ghana into francophone West Africa, Nigeria, and beyond forces Oze to constantly adapt to new regulatory environments, which consumes legal, compliance, and engineering resources and can slow expansion.
Competitive and ecosystem risk: As SME digitization becomes a hotter space, banks, telecom operators, and other fintechs may build similar tools or data pipes. Large players with deeper pockets could try to replicate parts of Oze’s model or acquire its partners. Maintaining a defensible “moat” based on data quality, product experience, and depth of integrations will be essential.
Ensuring data protection and trust at scale: As Oze holds increasingly sensitive financial information on businesses, it must maintain very high standards of cybersecurity and transparency. Any perceived misuse or breach of data could erode trust among both MSMEs and financial partners, undermining the entire model.

Strategic Outlook & Opportunities

Looking ahead, Oze is positioned to grow along three main axes: geography, product depth, and ecosystem role. Geographically, the company has already moved beyond Ghana into other West African markets and is well placed to keep expanding. The fundamental pain points it solves—lack of records, lack of credit, and inefficient manual processes—are shared across many African countries. By leveraging pan-African banking groups and regional microfinance networks, Oze can enter new countries with anchored partners rather than starting from scratch. Strategic investors like Visa and DEG not only contribute capital, but also open doors to banks, payment processors, and regulators across the continent, creating a clearer path for Oze to become a multi-country standard for SME data and lending. That kind of backing matters because Oze scales fastest through institutional partnerships, not just individual app downloads.

**Visa + DEG backing: signals credibility + distribution for scaling Oze’s LMS**

On the product side, Oze can continue evolving from a “bookkeeping + loans” app into a full financial operating system for MSMEs. Integrating payment acceptance (via mobile money and card rails), simple online storefronts, inventory tools, and payroll would allow MSMEs to run more of their operations from one platform, while deepening the data exhaust that feeds Oze’s AI models. Each new feature that sits on top of the same data layer increases the company’s revenue opportunities—subscription upgrades, payment fees, embedded insurance or savings—without losing focus on the core mission. Over time, the AI layer can become more sophisticated: not just scoring credit risk, but also predicting seasonal inventory needs, recommending pricing adjustments, flagging fraud, and even benchmarking performance against peers. This positions Oze as not just a data collector but a true AI co-pilot for African small businesses.

Finally, Oze’s ecosystem role is likely to expand. Rather than only serving MSMEs directly, Oze can embed its scoring and lending tools inside other platforms as an invisible infrastructure layer—powering SME credit for B2B marketplaces, logistics platforms, agri-value chains, and even government SME support programs. This B2B2C model could massively multiply Oze’s reach, as every partner that absorbs its APIs brings a new pool of potential borrowers and data. At the same time, Oze will need to manage portfolio quality carefully, ensuring that faster growth does not compromise underwriting standards or repayment rates. If it succeeds, Oze can become a cornerstone of Africa’s SME finance architecture: a trusted data intermediary that makes it economical for the financial system to serve the “missing middle” of entrepreneurs who are too big for microcredit but too small or informal for traditional corporate banking.

Conclusions

Oze started in Ghana with a simple, powerful idea: if you can get entrepreneurs to track their businesses digitally, you can help them run better today and unlock capital for them tomorrow. In a few years, that idea has grown into a platform with continent-wide ambitions, backed by global investors and used by tens of thousands of MSMEs. By combining a user-friendly app, an AI-driven credit engine, and deep partnerships with financial institutions, Oze has carved out a distinctive role at the intersection of fintech, data, and development. It demonstrates that AI in Africa does not have to be abstract or imported; it can be grounded in the daily reality of shopkeepers, traders, and small manufacturers—and it can deliver both social impact and sustainable commercial returns.

The road ahead is not without challenges: scaling across diverse markets, keeping users engaged, and staying ahead of competition will all test the company. But the fundamentals—a huge underserved market, clear product-market fit, strong founding team, and growing data advantage—suggest that Oze has a real opportunity to shape how Africa finances its entrepreneurial base. As such, it is not just a successful startup story; it is a lens into how localized, context-aware AI and fintech solutions can help transform African economies from the bottom up.