As businesses across Nigeria face tightening margins, rising operational costs, and increasingly complex workflows, one Nigerian tech founder is betting that the key to unlocking real productivity lies not in more hands, but smarter systems.
Peter Ukonu, Founder and CEO of Byte Cognetics, is the creator of Antly Nigeria and Africa’s first No-Code AI Work Operating System (Work OS).
The platform is a transformative tool built for African businesses looking to streamline operations, automate tasks, centralize communication, and improve decision-making—all without hiring developers or deploying heavy software stacks.
At a time when many local enterprises are bogged down by inefficient manual processes, scattered documents, and disconnected tools, Antly offers something radically different: an intelligent, modular system that allows organizations to digitize and automate their core functions—on their own terms.
Whether you’re a logistics firm managing dispatches across three cities, a government agency handling internal memos, or a fintech startup juggling support tickets and approvals, Antly meets you at the point of your operational pain.
For Peter Ukonu, this wasn’t just about building another SaaS product. It was about fixing something fundamentally broken in how businesses on the continent operate. “There’s no productivity when your people are busy managing chaos,” Ukonu said. “Antly brings clarity. It connects the dots and makes execution seamless.”
The platform’s product suite reflects this vision. It includes a robust task and ticket management system, electronic document workflows (EDMS), workflow automation tools, real-time dashboards, omnichannel communications, and a smart knowledge base—all powered by its proprietary Agentic Node engine, which learns from user behavior and improves over time.
But perhaps most importantly for Nigerian businesses, Antly requires zero code and minimal onboarding. It’s fully self-service, mobile-friendly, and designed to work even in infrastructure-stretched environments—allowing businesses to scale smarter, not just harder.
This vision comes at a critical moment in Nigeria’s economy. With the recent removal of fuel subsidies, exchange rate volatility, and rising cost of capital, many businesses are being forced to rethink how they operate. Tools like Antly could become essential for reducing waste, tightening operations, and building resilience.
Ukonu understands this deeply. “Most Nigerian companies are spending time and money on things they should’ve automated years ago. We built Antly so you don’t have to call a developer or buy five different apps just to run your business properly.”
Now, Byte Cognetics is extending this vision to Nigeria’s booming informal and micro-business sector. In its next update, Antly will roll out a no-code e-commerce platform designed for entrepreneurs, creators, and traders with little to no technical background. With it, anyone can set up an online store, manage inventory, receive payments, and communicate with customers—all from a mobile phone.
This move has huge implications. From Aba to Alaba, and from Yaba to Onitsha, millions of merchants currently rely on WhatsApp, Instagram, or word-of-mouth to sell their goods, with no real infrastructure or protection against platform shutdowns or payment issues. Antly’s e-commerce engine offers them a reliable, Nigerian-built alternative.
“We’re going from a world where e-commerce is a luxury, to one where it’s an everyday tool for everyone,” Ukonu said. “This is about inclusion and giving small businesses the same firepower as the big guys.”
Antly’s expansion is already gaining traction. The platform has begun onboarding public institutions and is in discussions for broader state-level deployment. The company is also forming partnerships with tech hubs, consultants, and resellers to drive adoption across sectors—government, health, logistics, education, and manufacturing.
For Nigeria’s digital economy, this is more than a promising startup story. It’s the emergence of homegrown infrastructure—technology that is built with Nigerian realities in mind, priced affordably, and scalable across the continent.
As the tech industry shifts focus from flashy apps to deep operational impact, Antly may well become the invisible engine behind some of Nigeria’s most efficient businesses.
And in Peter Ukonu, the country may have found a new kind of visionary—one who’s not just building software, but laying down the tracks for how African enterprises run in the 21st century.
