This startup is building access to global work from Africa

For many job seekers across Africa, the challenge isn’t just the absence of opportunities; it is also the lack of access to these opportunities. While remote jobs, digital gigs, and global work platforms continue to expand, participation from emerging markets often remains limited by infrastructure, trust, and fragmented tools.

This is the problem Chris Agholor set out to solve with Totlesoft.

Launched in 2024, Totlesoft is positioned as an all-in-one platform that connects talent, businesses, and researchers within a single ecosystem. The platform is built on a simple idea of creating equal access to opportunities that already exist globally.

Totlesoft is an AI-powered distributed workforce and research infrastructure. While it can be described as a talent platform, Agholor insists it goes beyond traditional recruitment marketplaces. Instead, it integrates a job and task distribution system, a marketplace with an embedded affiliate engine, and a research infrastructure for surveys and data collection.

Within the job system, users can access tasks such as content moderation, social media evaluation, and rating jobs, which are similar to global micro-task platforms. The marketplace allows businesses and creators to list both physical and digital products, which platform affiliates can promote for commissions.

The third layer, which focuses on research, enables institutions and individuals to run surveys, recruit participants, and gather insights with geographic targeting and AI-assisted matching.

“All these things were scattered,” Agholor explains. “So we packaged everything together in one place.”

The inspiration for Totlesoft came from observing the recurring pattern in which talent exists but infrastructure doesn’t.

Agholor argues that the perception of job scarcity in Africa is often misleading. According to him, many opportunities exist globally, but Africans struggle to access them due to platform restrictions, lack of systems, or workarounds such as VPN usage, which can be linked to fraud and unpaid labour.

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Beyond talent, he also noticed that businesses struggle to sell products globally. Researchers also struggle to find reliable participants. These overlapping challenges led to the creation of a unified system designed to serve all three groups.

“I want to see people get jobs easily,” he says. “And I want to attract global companies to bring the same opportunities available elsewhere to Africa.”

Totlesoft operates with two primary user groups: clients and workers. Clients, which include businesses, marketers, and researchers, have access to a multi-functional dashboard.

From a single interface, they can list products in the marketplace and recruit affiliates to sell them, accept payments in multiple currencies, including crypto and PayPal, with conversion to local currency. They can also create and manage surveys, with options for automatic or manual participant payments, launch campaigns for social media engagement or awareness, and post direct jobs (e.g., graphic design tasks), with escrow-based payment protection.

Payments for jobs are held in escrow and released only after the client approves the completed work.

Workers, on the other hand, can apply for project-based or task-based jobs, participate in surveys and earn payments, sell products as affiliates, offer services as gigs or subscription-based offerings, and engage with job-related updates through a feed system.

The platform also includes a qualification system that assesses or matches users to opportunities based on their profile and performance.

Totlesoft is currently bootstrapped and in its early growth phase.

The platform generates revenue primarily through a 5% commission on transactions, including jobs and marketplace activities. Additional revenue comes from smaller fees tied to platform usage.

Since launching in 2024, Totlesoft has grown to over 2,000 users, generated approximately $9,850 in total platform revenue, and recorded about $4,350 in profit. Its monthly revenue fluctuates with user activity; it typically ranges from $200 to $300.

Growth so far has been largely organic, with limited promotional efforts. According to Agholor, a structured publicity push only recently began as part of a broader roadmap.

The Totlesoft journey hasn’t been without setbacks. While attempting to launch on the Google Play Store, Totlesoft faced a major disruption when a third-party developer account used to publish the app was sold, along with the app itself, without the founder’s consent. This forced the team to restart the process from scratch.

After multiple attempts and delays, the app was successfully republished in early 2025 using a newly secured developer account.

The company currently operates with a small but growing team, including a backend engineer, product manager, marketers, and a social media manager, as it prepares for its next phase.

According to the founder, Totlesoft’s primary differentiator lies in its consolidation of multiple services into a single platform.

Agholor compares existing platforms as fragmented: freelance platforms focus on jobs, affiliate platforms focus on sales, and research platforms focus solely on surveys. Totlesoft, in contrast, integrates all three.

In addition, the platform combines global and local opportunities, including support for local services such as artisans alongside remote digital work. The inclusion of a work-focused social feed, similar to LinkedIn but restricted to job-related content, is also designed to improve user retention and engagement.

Looking ahead, Totlesoft plans to deepen its AI capabilities, particularly in matching workers to jobs and detecting fraudulent activity.

A key focus is improving trust within the system, especially for international clients concerned about location-based requirements and misuse of VPNs.

Agholor also envisions the platform becoming one of Africa’s largest digital work and research ecosystems, targeting millions of users over time.

“Our goal is to build one of the largest African workplace and market research platforms,” he says.