In much of Africa, commerce has moved from traditional websites to more informal engagements such as chats. From WhatsApp to Instagram DMs, many small businesses sell products through conversations, juggling orders, payments, and customer interactions manually.
For Ibrahima Sylla and Christian Okoth, founders of Yelen, this process presented an opportunity. Launched in June 2025 and headquartered in Côte d’Ivoire, Yelen is positioning itself as an all-in-one platform for social sellers, combining storefronts, payments, and customer management into a single system.
In less than a year, the startup has grown to thousands of users across multiple African markets.
What Yelen is building
Yelen is a platform designed primarily for merchants who sell via messaging apps and social media platforms. Sellers can manage orders originating from WhatsApp, Facebook, and an Instagram integration that lets them import posts directly into their storefronts.
At its core, the product enables users to create an online storefront, collect payments, and manage customers and sales cycles, all within a single platform.
The platform supports payments via card, mobile money, and other methods across 20 African countries. Beyond payments and storefronts, Yelen also integrates tools for automating sales responses and managing customer interactions across social channels.
However, Sylla says the broader ambition goes beyond these core features.
“The long-term vision is to build a full ecosystem where sellers can manage their entire business lifecycle, from conversations to transactions, within one platform,” Sylla says. “Even for products such as tools for sourcing goods from China and upcoming logistics features.”
From experimentation to product-market fit
Before landing on the current product, Sylla experimented with multiple ideas after leaving his previous employer, Google, in May 2024. Prior to that, he also worked as a sales manager at Anka. His decision to leave corporate life was driven by a desire for impact.
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Returning to Côte d’Ivoire, he launched several products, including a creator marketplace called Alpha Influencer, designed to connect brands with creators across francophone Africa. While the product gained some traction, Sylla saw the market wasn’t ready. He took on software development projects for universities before eventually pivoting again.
Sylla partnered with Okoth, the company’s CTO and co-founder, whom he met through the African Leadership Group (ALX Africa). The Yelen idea, however, came from direct conversations with sellers.
“We were talking with customers (sellers) and asking them about their challenges. They told us about difficulties with collecting payments and managing sales across WhatsApp and Instagram,” Sylla says.
While Yelen started as a solution for a single client, it has evolved, gaining traction through referrals. That organic adoption signalled product-market fit and led the team to fully commit to Yelen.
How Yelen works
Yelen is designed to simplify the selling process for both merchants and their customers. Sellers can sign up on the platform and create a storefront. New users undergo a qualification process to ensure they are active sellers. From their dashboard, they can list products, whether physical or digital, manage orders and customers, access marketing tools, and track payments.
Payments collected from customers are held in a wallet on the platform, which sellers can withdraw to their bank accounts or mobile money.
The buyers receive a store link from the seller and can browse products, place orders, and pay via card, mobile money, or cash. Once payment is completed, the funds are held until the order is fulfilled, after which the seller receives the payout, after Yelen’s commission is deducted.
The business model
Yelen operates a hybrid business model combining subscriptions and transaction-based fees.
Its free plan processes a 10% commission per sale. The growth plan offers a subscription of approximately $60 per quarter plus a 5% commission; the business plan offers a subscription of €200 annually with 0% commission.
In addition, Yelen earns 2–3% commission from its product sourcing service for sellers importing goods from China.
By adding product sourcing from China and logistics and shipping, Yelen is moving beyond software into operational infrastructure. But that introduces supply chain complexities, execution risk, and lower margins than pure SaaS. This makes the model harder to scale efficiently.
However, since launching on June 2, 2025, the company has recorded 5,000 active stores across 10 African countries, $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and nearly $50,000 in processed transactions.
Its user base is concentrated in 10 francophone African markets, including Senegal, Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Benin, Niger, Gabon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The competitive advantage and the future of Yelen
While Yelen operates in the broader e-commerce infrastructure space, Sylla says the startup is fundamentally different from global platforms like Shopify.
For one, Yelen enables sellers to set up a storefront in about three minutes, compared to significantly longer setup times on more complex platforms. And unlike platforms that rely on integrations like Stripe or PayPal, Yelen supports mobile money without requiring foreign business entities.
Beyond storefronts, Yelen is building tools for payment processing, product sourcing, and logistics. This approach aims to support sellers not just in setting up shop, but in growing their businesses.
While Africa’s commerce market still has significant room for growth, Yelen hopes to play a role in building the rails that power that growth.
“Our vision is to be the e-commerce infrastructure for social sellers,” Sylla says.
