Prosper AI: AI Business Agent for Nigerian SMEs

Nigeria has 39M SMEs without accountants. Prosper is an AI agent that records sales, sends invoices, tracks who owes you money — all through chat in English or Nigerian pidgin.

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Inspiration

Nigeria has over 39 million SMEs — market traders, shop owners, artisans, and freelancers — who run their businesses entirely from memory or paper notebooks. They forget who owes them money, can't easily send professional invoices, and have no way to know their daily profit. Hiring an accountant is too expensive. Existing business software is too complex.

We asked: what if a business owner could just talk to their business assistant the same way they chat on WhatsApp?

What it does

Prosper Assistant is an AI business agent that helps Nigerian SMEs manage their business through simple chat. In plain English or Pidgin, a business owner can:

  • Record sales — "I sold 10 bags of cement for ₦100,000, cost was ₦80,000"
  • Create and send invoices — "Send invoice to Chidi for ₦50,000 for office supplies"
  • Track who owes them money — "Who owes me money?"
  • Get business reports — "Give me today's report" or "Lifetime report"
  • Manage customers — track contact details, outstanding balances, and payment history

Invoices are generated as PDFs and sent via email automatically. The dashboard shows real-time metrics — today's revenue, profit, outstanding balances, and customer count.

How we built it

  • AI Agent: Google ADK (Agent Development Kit) with Gemini 2.0 Flash as the reasoning engine
  • Backend: Python + FastMCP + Starlette, deployed on Google Cloud Run
  • Database: MongoDB Atlas (multi-tenant by Firebase UID)
  • Authentication: Firebase Authentication (Google, Phone OTP, Email/Password)
  • Frontend: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript hosted on Firebase Hosting
  • Email: Resend API for transactional invoice delivery
  • PDF: jsPDF for client-side invoice generation

The agent uses function calling to decide when to record a sale, create an invoice, or fetch reports — without the user needing to navigate any menus.

Challenges we ran into

  • AI response consistency: The AI kept rewording structured data in different ways each time, breaking our frontend renderers. We solved this by bypassing the AI for data functions and returning structured results directly from the backend.
  • Firebase auth across custom domains: Google's signInWithRedirect required registering the custom domain's OAuth redirect URI, which took time to propagate.
  • Multi-tenant data migration: Early accounts used business-name-based IDs. After adding Firebase Auth, we had to migrate all existing data to Firebase UIDs and build an account recovery flow.
  • Nigerian context: Getting the AI to correctly interpret Pidgin English, local number formats ("20k", "200k"), and Nigerian phone numbers (08012345678 → +2348012345678).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A fully working AI agent that understands Nigerian business language and context
  • End-to-end invoice flow: chat → PDF generation → email delivery in seconds
  • Real-time dashboard that updates after every transaction
  • Clean, professional UI that works on both desktop and mobile
  • Complete auth system with Google, Phone OTP, and Email/Password sign-in
  • Live at prosperassistant.online ## What we learned
  • Google ADK's function calling is powerful for building domain-specific agents — the key is designing the right tools and system prompt
  • Structured backend responses beat trying to parse free-form AI text on the frontend
  • Nigerian SMEs need solutions that meet them where they are — simple chat, not dashboards
  • Firebase + Cloud Run + MongoDB is a solid, cost-effective stack for a multi-tenant SaaS MVP ## What's next for Prosper AI: AI Business Agent for Nigerian SMEs
  • WhatsApp integration — so business owners can use Prosper directly from WhatsApp without opening a browser
  • Payment reminders — automatically send SMS/email reminders to customers with outstanding invoices
  • Subscription tiers — free plan for basic features, paid plans for unlimited invoices and advanced reports
  • Expense tracking — log business expenses alongside revenue for accurate profit calculation
  • Multi-store support — allow one account to manage multiple business locations

Built With

  • fastmcp
  • firebase-authentication
  • firebase-hosting
  • gemini-2.0-flash
  • google-adk-(agent-development-kit)
  • google-cloud-run
  • html/css/javascript
  • jspdf
  • mongodb-atlas
  • python
  • resend-(email-api)
  • starlette
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