Orova

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  Orova's Logo

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Inspiration

Managing money in emerging markets means juggling apps: one to send money, another to buy crypto, another to pay for airtime and data, another to order food, each with its own interface, login, and learning curve, and most assume you can read English and navigate a menu-driven UI fluently. That stack quietly excludes anyone who isn't already online-literate, especially in markets like Nigeria where mobile money already runs daily life but the tools around it don't meet people where they are.

We asked a simpler question: *What if all of it from moving money, converting currency, paying for things was just one conversation using your voice? *

What it does

Orova is an AI voice agent for your finances. In 90+ languages, users speak a command, and Orova executes it: move money, convert between crypto and local currency (on-ramp and off-ramp), pay for airtime, data, or everyday purchases like food, all from one interface instead of five separate apps. Solana runs underneath as the settlement rail, chosen for speed and near-zero fees, since the use case is frequent small transactions, not occasional large transfers. Crypto is the plumbing; the product is "say what you want done with your money."

How we built it

We built the voice layer first: a natural-language pipeline that parses financial intent across 90+ languages, including informal phrasing and code-switching, so a user in Lagos, Nairobi, or Manila speaks the way they'd speak to a person, not the way an app expects. Each parsed intent routes to the right execution path, a Solana transaction for sends and swaps, an on/off-ramp integration for currency conversion, or a merchant/provider integration for airtime, data, and purchases — with a spoken confirmation step before anything executes, so a misheard word can't become a wrong transaction.

Challenges we ran into

Consolidating multiple financial actions into one voice interface raised the stakes on accuracy: a swap, an off-ramp, and a food payment all need to be distinguishable from a single spoken sentence, with no room for the app to guess wrong. Getting confirmation flows fast enough to feel natural, but explicit enough that users always know what they're about to authorise, took real iteration.

The other challenge was trust. Many of our early users had never used a crypto or fintech app as a "voice-activated money app" before, which is a hard sell on faith alone. We grew the first cohort through direct, one-on-one community outreach rather than expecting adoption to follow from the product alone.

Distribution has been the third challenge. Our target users are the hardest to reach through conventional channels, the same lack of app-fluency and English-first digital habits that Orova is built to solve also makes standard app-store and social-ad acquisition less effective for this audience. We've had to lean on grassroots, community-led growth instead of assuming paid or organic app-store discovery would work on its own.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We secured a non-dilutive grant from the Solana Foundation via Superteam, funding the build without giving up equity, on the strength of the product alone rather than a funding round. That validation extended beyond the grant itself: Superteam and other notable voices and communities in the Solana and broader crypto ecosystem have publicly highlighted Orova, which mattered as an early signal in a space where credibility is hard to earn without a track record.

On the user side, we've onboarded over 300 registered users — a meaningful number given that most of them are people trying crypto-adjacent tools for the first time, onboarded through direct, person-by-person outreach rather than paid acquisition.

What we learned

The friction people actually feel is: I have too many apps and none of them speak my language, literally. Solving that turned out to matter more to early users than any DeFi-specific feature.

We also learned that trust compounds from individual relationships before it scales; our growth so far has been earned person by person, not generated by the product alone.

What's next for Orova

We're expanding language and market coverage, converting our early registered-user base into consistent active usage, and widening the range of everyday payments, bills, merchants, and more local services, that can be handled by voice, so Orova keeps closing the gap between "financial app" and "one conversation."

Built With

• anchor
• natural-language-processing
• react-native
• solana
• web3.js