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In buildAfricaCommerce + fintech

Mercado

The commerce operating system for Africa.

An integrated platform that scales from a solo WhatsApp seller to a 50-branch retail chain — bringing POS, ordering, inventory, accounting, and payments into one system.

Visit mercado.africaBuilt & backed by Morphlix
mercado — merchant console
Category
Commerce + fintech
Market
Africa
Status
In build
Relationship
Built & backed
Website
mercado.africa

The problem

Why it exists.

African merchants run their businesses across disconnected tools — a chat app for orders, a notebook for inventory, a separate ledger for accounts, and payment rails that rarely talk to each other.

Growth from a solo seller to a multi-branch chain means outgrowing each of those tools in turn — and every migration costs the merchant time, data, and trust with customers.

Orders in a chat app

Sales arrive as free-form WhatsApp messages.

Inventory in a notebook

Stock counts drift between branches.

Accounts kept apart

A separate ledger nobody reconciles daily.

Rails that don't talk

Payments land outside the books.

The product

One operating system for the whole business.

POS terminals, WhatsApp-native ordering, real-time multi-location inventory, double-entry accounting, and payment processing across African rails — in one platform a merchant never outgrows.

POS terminals

Multi-tenant point of sale that works the same on one counter or fifty.

WhatsApp ordering

Customers order in the channel they already use; orders arrive structured.

Real-time inventory

Multi-location stock synced continuously, so counts stop drifting.

Double-entry accounting

A proper ledger underneath every sale, refund, and transfer.

Payment orchestration

Card, transfer, and mobile money across African rails in one flow.

The AI inside

Selling where customers already are.

Incoming WhatsApp orders are parsed by an AI layer that turns free-form messages into structured, priced order lines.

Merchants keep selling in the channel their customers use, without a single line of manual data entry — the order lands in inventory, accounts, and the payment flow already reconciled.

01

Message arrives

A customer sends a free-form order over WhatsApp.

02

AI parses intent

Items, quantities, and variants are extracted and priced against the catalogue.

03

Order is created

A structured, priced order line lands in inventory, accounts, and payments.

Order parsing pipelineWhatsApp → ledger

Under the hood

What Mercado runs on.

Studio platform

Multi-tenant POS architecture

One codebase serving thousands of independent merchants.

WhatsApp ordering pipeline

Message ingest, parsing, and order creation as a single flow.

Real-time multi-location inventory sync

Event-driven stock updates across every branch.

Payment orchestration across African rails

Routing, retries, and settlement per provider.

Double-entry accounting backend

Ledger integrity enforced at the data layer.

Where it stands

In build, in market.

Mercado is actively in development inside the studio — engineered, operated, and backed by our team as we bring it to market.

Relationship

Mercado is an independent company with its own brand and domain. Morphlix builds it and backs it — contributing engineering, cloud architecture, and operating support.

How the studio works

Core platform

POS, inventory, and ledger in production use.

Shipped

WhatsApp ordering

AI order parsing live with pilot merchants.

Shipped

Payment orchestration

Expanding rail coverage across markets.

In build

Multi-branch chains

Franchise and 50-branch operating tooling.

Next

See it for yourself

The commerce operating system for Africa.

Visit Mercado, or talk to the studio about building the next venture in this category.