A Conversation with Beem's Founder & CEO Taha Jiwaji On Their Official Launch In Kenya, The Conve...

Beem offers an omni-channel communication platform that brings together USSD, Airtime, Mobile Payments, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook & Instagram channels to engage, verify, authenticate, notify or pay customers. Beem is a Pan-African startup with a presence across more than 25 African markets. Beem envisions an Africa powered by enterprises, empowered through technology. Beem strives for this by enabling enterprises to interact and transact with customers across Africa using SMS, USSD, airtime, chat, and other products.
Beem's flagship offering is Moja, a complete business messenger for sales and services. Moja combines the power of WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Google, and SMS in one inbox for an entire team. Moja also brings together powerful additional tools such as a CRM, automation, tagging, reporting, chat payments, and chatbots to supercharge sales & deliver amazing customer service.
In our conversation, Taha shared his background as an engineer who graduated from Lafayette University in the US before he joined Cap Gemini as a Technology Consultant. However, he opted to return home a few years later to his home country Tanzania where he worked with his parents in a computer shop in Dar Es Salaam's bustling commercial hub, Kariakoo.
It was during his time working at the computer shop that the idea of what would become Beem was birthed from the need to market computers to University students in Dar Es Salaam that saw Tara using SMS sent from a single basic features phone was successful in generating sales. Taha then created one of Tanzania's first local SMS marketing platforms called 'Bongo Live' in 2011 which grew to become quite successful.
However, over 10 years later, Taha has pivoted the Bongo Live offering into a comprehensive platform of messaging capabilities through an integrated web-based dashboard for all popular platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and still SMS. This 'pivot' led to a rebrand of Bongo Live to Beem due to the new business focus and model. Have a listen to hear the incredibly insightful and inspiring journey that Taha and now Been is on to revolutionise conversational commerce in Kenya, Africa, and the rest of the world!