Running a small business in Nigeria will probably make you familiar with the WhatsApp HR system, where most people operations are managed informally across WhatsApp messages, spreadsheets with multiple people accessing them and manual processes. It often results in missed information, incorrect payroll details, inconsistent performance reviews and all the things that somehow work until they don’t.
It was a problem Adetoun Adele-Muraina and Adetola Abolarinwa kept encountering through their work with growing businesses, and one that would eventually lead them to build PeoplePulse Africa.
Through their work at Bridgemead Consulting, the two founders worked closely with growing businesses across recruitment, payroll, performance management and other HR processes, where they began to notice surprisingly similar problems. As these businesses grew and their teams became more complex, the systems they used to manage their people had often not grown with them.
It wasn’t that these founders didn’t care about their employees or want to build good workplaces. Many did. The problem was that managing people had become a patchwork of WhatsApp messages, spreadsheets, manual processes and different tools that didn’t necessarily speak to one another.
Who is on leave? When was this employee last reviewed? Is their information up to date? What happened during their onboarding? Has payroll been updated? Who actually has access to that spreadsheet?
The obvious answer was to get HR software, except that created another problem.
A lot of the available options simply weren’t built for businesses like these. Some were made for much larger organisations with full HR departments and bigger budgets. Others fixed one problem at a time, so you could still end up with different platforms for payroll, performance, employee records – a workbook with different sheets.
For a growing business trying to make things simpler, the “solution” could quickly become another complexity to manage.
“We knew we didn’t want to build another HR platform that assumed every business already had a large HR team or the resources of a big organisation. A lot of the businesses we had worked with were being run by founders, operations teams or one person handling several responsibilities. The technology we proposed had to make sense too. It needed to be simple, affordable and built around how growing African businesses actually work,” said Adetoun Adele-Muraina.
PeoplePulse Africa is an HR technology platform built to help SMEs manage their people and establish more structured HR systems without needing the resources or infrastructure of a large organisation.
And the people it is designed for are not necessarily HR professionals.
In a growing Nigerian business, “HR” might be the founder. Or the operations manager. Or an administrator handling payroll, employee records and leave requests alongside several other responsibilities. Sometimes, it is a very small HR team trying to keep up with a company that is hiring faster than its internal processes can evolve.
That reality shaped how PeoplePulse was built, creating a platform that could work for the people actually managing growing teams, whether or not they had an established HR department behind them.
The company has participated in the Providus Bank SME Programme and the Village Capital x Standard Chartered Women in Tech Accelerator 2026, and is currently participating in a founder programme by Antler Nigeria, gaining access to a wider network of investors and founders as the business continues to grow.
Adetoun and Adetola are looking to take PeoplePulse to more growing businesses across Africa, betting that as these businesses scale, the systems supporting their people will scale with them.
