Bulto

Inspiration

Working in Lusaka has helped us realize how hard it is to get stuff done as an SME, hard to get a bank account ,hard to get funding, this makes it really hard to grow and expand small businesses, over the past 3 years we have had to bootstrap most of our funding, with no track record of sales or inquiries.

What it does

Bulto makes it easy for small businnesses to be able to borrow loans, we work with banks, Microfinance Ins

How we built it

How we built it

Bulto was built with a vision to empower SMEs in Africa by streamlining the process of securing financial assistance. The platform was architected to integrate seamlessly with banks and microfinance institutions, providing a robust and user-friendly interface for loan applications and financial management.

Technology Stack

We chose Rust for its performance and safety guarantees to build the backend services. Rust's powerful type system and ownership model allowed us to develop a highly concurrent and memory-safe application without the typical overhead of garbage collection found in other languages.

Microservices Architecture

We adopted a microservices architecture to ensure scalability and maintainability. Each service is responsible for a specific piece of business logic, such as user management, credit scoring, and transaction processing. This approach allowed us to deploy updates with minimal downtime and scale individual services according to demand.

GraphQL API

We exposed our services through a GraphQL API, which provided a flexible and efficient way for front-end applications to interact with the backend. GraphQL's ability to fetch complex data structures in a single request reduced network overhead and improved the user experience.

External Services Integration

We intend to build adapters to connect with external APIs from banks and financial institutions. These adapters handle authentication, data transformation, and error handling, providing a clean interface for our services to initiate transactions and retrieve financial data.

Challenges we ran into

Getting a partner to pilot the project with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Full development of our back end, initializing the mobile app development, piloting with 3 Microfinance Institutions

What we learned

Building software that's usable is a really hard task, it's like making a magazine cover that everyone has to read, we had to go through several customer interviews to fully understand what they needed, and this was awesome

What's next for Bulto

We intend to increase the number of partners, over the next 6 months, that is the number of MFI's , Banks and small business owners, we intend to integrate our platfrom with an increased number of mobile money providers making it easier for us to build a more reliable credit profile. We wanted to be able to increase our dataset and also the number of users.

Built With

• expo.io
• graphql
• javascript
• react-native
• rust
• supabase