• Nigerian startup Truee is building structured, verified business profiles designed to be understood by AI systems.
• The company says its early Nigerian pilot has 70 business profiles, including businesses that rely heavily on WhatsApp and social media.
• The pitch is simple: a business can be online and still be hard for an AI assistant to identify correctly.
As people start asking AI for a restaurant, tailor or plumber, a Nigerian startup is betting that a clean business record may become as useful as a good Instagram page.
A customer does not always type a business name into Google anymore. They might ask an AI assistant for a tailor in Yaba, a restaurant nearby or a plumber who can come today. The answer depends on what the system can find — and whether what it finds is true.
That is the gap Truee wants to work on. The Nigerian startup, founded this year by Adekola Adedokun, has launched a platform for businesses to publish a profile with their services, contact details, location, portfolio and the way they want to be described. The point is not another social page. It is information formatted for machines that increasingly answer people’s questions.
Being online is not the same as being understood
Many Nigerian businesses already have a digital footprint. The problem is that it is scattered.
A food vendor may be active on Instagram. A freelancer may send work samples over WhatsApp. A small shop may have an old address in one directory and a new number in another. That works when a person is willing to scroll, compare and ask questions. It becomes messier when an AI tool is trying to produce one confident answer from fragments.
Truee says its profiles are meant to give a business one structured record: services, locations, contacts, credentials and proof of work. In its launch report, Disrupt Africa said the company was testing with Nigerian businesses, freelancers and service providers, and had 70 business profiles in its early pilot.
The phrase to watch is “AI discoverability”. It sounds technical. In ordinary terms, it asks whether a business can be found and described correctly when a customer asks a machine for help.
The real product is trust
A neat profile is not enough if the information inside it is wrong.
Truee says its system is built around owner-provided and verifiable information. Its own site describes a process where businesses publish official details, structure them into a machine-readable profile and make them available for AI discovery. The company says the ambition is to reduce the wrong addresses, outdated contacts and invented details that can appear when AI systems rely on old web pages and scattered listings.
That is an early-stage promise, not a guarantee. Truee is still bootstrapped, pre-revenue and testing its first version. It cannot decide how every AI model ranks information or whether a customer will use an AI assistant before a search engine. But it has put its finger on a new business problem: a company may spend years learning social media and still be unprepared for the next place customers look.
Why small businesses should care before the big brands do
Big companies can afford teams that manage websites, search rankings, listings and customer support. A small business usually cannot.
That is why the AI-search shift could matter most for people who sell through one phone, one storefront or one trusted WhatsApp number. If their information becomes easier to verify and update, it could make a referral from an AI tool more useful. If it stays scattered, a customer may be sent to an old number, the wrong location or a competitor with cleaner digital information.
It is the same tension behind the wider digital hustle. New technology looks distant until it changes how people discover work, services and customers. The business owner who understands that early may not need to become an AI expert. They may just need to keep the basics accurate: the name, the service, the price range, the location and the contact route.
A new kind of business listing
Truee is also trying to make money from that information layer. According to Disrupt Africa, the company plans premium profiles, verification and paid tools for businesses that want greater control over how they are represented. It also sees future integrations with AI companies and other platforms.
That means it is entering a crowded space occupied by directories and services such as Google Business Profile. Its distinction is the claim that the data is structured specifically for AI tools rather than only for human browsing.
Whether that becomes a useful business habit will depend on something more basic than AI hype: do Nigerian entrepreneurs see a result? Do they get fewer wrong calls, better leads or a clearer way to show what they do? If not, “AI discoverability” will remain a clever phrase. If they do, it could become another part of keeping a small business visible.
The next online shopfront may not be a new app or another feed. It may be the one accurate answer an AI gives when a customer finally asks the right question.
Also read: Google picked six Nigerian news creators for its AI lab. Why owning the audience is the real prize
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Has an AI tool ever given you the wrong number, location or detail for a Nigerian business? Tell us in the comments.
