A one-person studio that has shipped eight production systems on a shared platform — ticketing, estate security, payments, licensing and AI tooling — each built for mobile money, local currency and how work is actually done here.
Global SaaS doesn't take mobile money, doesn't price in shillings, and doesn't understand a gate book or a MoMo reconciliation. Local buyers are left with paper, spreadsheets and WhatsApp. We build the missing layer — and we build it from a shared platform, so each new product costs a fraction of the last.
Where we are, plainly: pre-revenue, no paying customers yet. What we have is a working, deployed product portfolio and the build velocity that produced it. This round buys distribution — the one thing we haven't yet proven.
The tools that run a Ugandan events company, a security firm or a retail chain are the same ones that ran them in 2005: a paper book, an Excel file, a WhatsApp group and someone's memory.
It isn't reluctance. It's that the global product genuinely does not work. Stripe doesn't reach them. Monthly dollar pricing doesn't survive the exchange rate. And the workflow on screen was designed for a market that doesn't look like this one.
MTN and Airtel move the money. Most international platforms offer card and bank only — which locks out the majority of customers before checkout.
A $49/month tool is not a small expense for an SME here. Local buyers need shilling pricing and per-use options, not annual seats.
Regional ticketing platforms take 5–13% of every sale and hold the float before paying out. The operator carries the risk; the platform takes the margin.
Vertical SaaS for this region is a volume game with a distribution problem, not a technology problem. The way to win is to make each new product nearly free to build, put several in front of real buyers, and pour resources into whichever one pulls.
Roles, audit, settings, billing, mobile money, SMS, ticketing and AI provider management are written once and reused. A new vertical starts at roughly 70% complete.
MTN and Airtel Request-to-Pay, shilling pricing, multi-currency with FX, SMS fallback and Android apps for staff who work away from a desk.
Every product is deployed and clickable. We learn from what people actually do with them — including when the answer is that they don't want the tool at all.
Why this is defensible: a competitor can copy any one of these products. What is slow to copy is the platform underneath — and the fact that building the next vertical takes us weeks, not quarters.
Each one runs in production today. Detail on the slides that follow.
Every product above is built on the same Laravel foundation. The modules below were written once and reused from product to product — which is why a solo founder has a portfolio instead of a prototype.
A new vertical doesn't start from an empty repository. It starts with authentication, roles, audit trails, billing, mobile money, notifications and a support desk already working, and adds only what is specific to that industry.
Sell tickets. Keep 100% of your money.
Event ticketing with automated mobile money verification. Organisers connect their own MTN or Airtel wallet, so funds settle directly to them and we never touch the float.
We benchmarked 13 platforms. Ticketsasa takes 10%, Mookh ~8%, Tix.africa 7–8%, Quicket ~4.9%, Eventbrite ~3.7% + fees. All of them hold the organiser's money first.
GatePass charges a flat per-event fee and takes 0% of sales.
The gate book, replaced.
Security operations for guard companies and landlords across Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda. Most estates still log every visitor by hand in a paper book that nobody ever reads back.
A guard company's contract renewal turns on whether the client believes patrols actually happened. GPS-verified rounds turn that argument into a service report the client can read — which is why this is a per-site contract, not a per-seat subscription.
Ships with a 19-section client specification document and a 14-phase deployment runbook — this is enterprise-sale ready, not a demo.
Show the client the room before anyone buys the paint.
Upload a photo of a room and see it repainted or retextured photorealistically — in colours and materials the firm actually stocks, linked to real SKUs and unit prices. Sold two ways: self-serve, or as a request a designer fulfils.
The diagnosis was uncomfortable and useful: they wanted the output, not the tool. Firms did not want to learn software — they wanted finished renderings for a client meeting on Thursday.
So the model changed. Visualisation-as-a-service first, priced per room, with the platform as the engine we run behind it. The self-serve product is the second step, sold to firms that have already bought the output.
This is the clearest example of why the studio model works: a failed go-to-market cost us weeks, not a company.
Six strangers. One shared interest. Sixty minutes.
Scheduled tables where six strangers who share an interest sit together for an hour. Explicitly not dating — a digital version of the stranger-dinner format, matched on what people actually want to talk about.
This is the most technically demanding thing in the portfolio — real-time infrastructure, matching, moderation and a mobile app — and it is public, hardened and running with verified backups and monitoring.
Sell, license and support software from one place.
Sell directly or through marketplaces, issue licence keys, control activations and run a support desk — the back office any software vendor needs and most build badly from scratch.
We license and sell our own software through it, so it is exercised in production rather than maintained speculatively. Its activation API is ready for the rest of the portfolio to call as each product is sold for self-hosting.
Sold as a one-time licence plus annual support to independent software vendors — a smaller market than ticketing, but one with almost no regional competition and very low support cost.
Digital gift cards that cannot be copied, issued and redeemed in shillings.
A voucher platform for companies and event organisers — design vouchers, issue them in bulk, verify them at the till and reconcile the money, with multi-currency and live exchange rates.
Where it fits: Ugandan employers hand out cash or hampers because paper vouchers are trivially copied and there is no local digital rail. Built on the same platform as GatePass, pointed at corporate gifting and staff benefits.
Your brand, forged.
A brand studio for businesses that cannot afford an agency. Answer a short questionnaire and Brandsmith returns a complete brand platform — then uses it as the context for everything it writes.
Brandsmith is the most feature-complete product in the portfolio and also the one facing the best-funded competition. Its defensible edge is local: a Kampala retailer can generate a week of posts in the language its customers actually use, which no global incumbent offers.
It also contributed the AI provider manager and credits system since reused elsewhere in the portfolio.
Rebuilt and renamed in 2026 — multi-engine AI routing, East African languages, campaigns, Video Studio, trial plans and a security pass.
Live streaming and direct fan payments for independent artists.
A ready-made presence for a DJ or radio host: live audio streaming, an events calendar, mobile money donations from listeners, sponsor ad slots and site-wide notifications.
Uganda's music and radio scene is large, informal and almost entirely on social platforms that pay creators nothing locally. Donations settle to the artist's own mobile money wallet — the same 0%-commission principle as GatePass, on a much shorter sales cycle.
Sold as a hosted subscription per artist, with a white-label version for stations.
We are not going to dress this up. Primarch has no paying customers and no revenue. What it has is an unusual amount of working software for a company of one, all of it deployed and verifiable in the next five minutes.
Every URL in this deck was checked on 20 September 2026 and returned a healthy response. If any link is down when you read this, that is a fault worth knowing about — please tell us.
Infrastructure: one Ubuntu VPS running 15 databases behind TLS, with nightly verified backups across every application, queue workers and schedulers under systemd.
| Product | Status | Tests |
|---|---|---|
| Table for Six | Public, hardened | 309 |
| Estate Security | Tier 1 complete | 160 |
| Primarch site | Live, 2FA enforced | 81 |
| GatePass | Core + scanner app | 12 suites |
We have spent the last period building and talking to buyers rather than selling. That produced no revenue and three conclusions we would not have reached from a spreadsheet.
Interior-design firms were genuinely interested and none of them bought. They did not want a tool to learn; they wanted renderings for Thursday's client meeting.
What changed: we now lead with a done-for-you service and sell the platform second, to people who already buy the output.
In ticketing, the complaint was never the software. It was losing 5–13% of the gate and waiting for a payout on money that was already theirs.
What changed: GatePass settles to the organiser's own wallet and charges a flat fee. That is the entire pitch.
Eight products in one year by one person says the engineering is handled. Zero customers says distribution is not.
What changed: this round is deliberately weighted towards sales and pilots rather than more engineering.
We are not going to quote a continental TAM figure at you. The number that matters for a company at this stage is how many customers we need before this works, and whether that number is reachable on foot from Kampala.
The honest version: the customer-count inputs below are our own working estimates from the local market, not purchased research. Validating them is an explicit objective of this round, and we will share what we find either way.
Initial geography: Uganda first, then Kenya and Rwanda — chosen because mobile money penetration, language and regulatory shape are close enough that one product serves all three.
| Line | Unit price | To reach UGX 50M / yr |
|---|---|---|
| GatePass flat fee per event | UGX 65,000 per event | ~770 events |
| Estate Security per site, monthly | UGX 150,000 per site / mo | ~28 sites |
| Interior Design per room rendered | UGX 120,000 per room | ~420 rooms |
Estate Security needs 28 paying sites to clear UGX 50M a year. There are more than that within an hour's drive of this desk. That is the shape of the opportunity — not a billion-dollar slide, a reachable first hundred customers.
Prices are our current list prices. Figures rounded; UGX 50M ≈ USD 13,000 at time of writing.
That is a positioning decision as much as a pricing one. It is what a regional operator instantly understands, and it is the thing incumbents cannot copy without dismantling their own revenue model.
A fixed fee per event, or a monthly subscription for frequent organisers. Funds settle to the organiser's own MTN or Airtel wallet.
0% of gross sales.
Priced per protected site with an annual contract, sold to guard companies who bundle it into what they already charge the landlord.
Highest contract value, longest cycle.
Per-room service pricing first, then subscription plans with generation credits for firms that want to self-serve.
Fastest path to first revenue.
One-time licence plus annual support for License Manager and Vouchers, including white-label deployments for resellers.
Low volume, near-zero marginal cost.
Everything is priced in shillings, payable by mobile money. No customer in our market should ever need a card or a dollar account to buy from us.
Weighted towards customers, not code. The build is largely done.
The portfolio is built, so only one developer is budgeted — and not until month 10, once one product is clearly pulling.
The largest share goes at the gap between working software and paying customers: two commercial hires, pilots cheap enough that a cautious first customer says yes, and the marketing to reach them. $26,000 — 43% of the round.
A founder salary is included, openly. $800 a month. A full-time founder with no income is a risk to the round, not a saving — and at Kampala rates, $60,000 carries the whole team for eighteen months.
| Line | 18 months |
|---|---|
| Founder salary $800 / month | $14,400 |
| Sales lead, Kampala $500 / month from month 1 | $9,000 |
| Customer success $400 / month from month 4 | $6,000 |
| Developer $700 / month from month 10 | $6,300 |
| Pilots & field hardware phones for guards, gate scanners, discounted first sites | $6,000 |
| Compliance & legal URSB, data protection, MTN & Airtel merchant onboarding | $5,000 |
| Marketing & Kenya entry including Nairobi travel | $5,000 |
| Infrastructure $150 / month | $2,700 |
| Contingency about 10% | $5,600 |
| Total | $60,000 |
Primarch is a single technical founder who designs, builds, deploys and operates everything in this deck — backend, frontend, mobile apps, servers, backups and documentation.
That is the honest strength and the honest limit. The strength is capital efficiency and speed that a funded team would struggle to match. The limit is reach, and it is exactly what this round is for.
Working style: the founder works from home for medical reasons, on both fixed and flexible hours, and has built this entire portfolio under that constraint. It is disclosed here because it is not a risk we intend to discover in diligence.
Laravel, Filament, Livewire, MySQL, Ionic/Capacitor mobile, Linux server administration, mobile money and SMS integrations, AI pipelines.
Shipped and operates eleven production deployments across eight products, with documented runbooks, verified nightly backups and roughly 130 automated test suites.
To turn eight working products into a first hundred paying customers. We are equally open to accelerator programmes and grant funding on the same terms of engagement.
A built portfolio, a reusable platform and a founder who has already demonstrated they ship — at pre-product valuation, without pre-product risk.
Eighteen months, costed line by line and weighted to sales and pilots — with the explicit goal of proving one line repeats and raising a seed round on evidence.
That a shilling-priced, zero-commission vertical product can be sold repeatably in Uganda — and then in Kenya on the same build.
Primarch Solutions — investor deck. Scroll to read all slides.