This ex-Google, ex-Anka founder is building Shopify but for social sellers in Francophone Africa

After leaving Google, Ibrahima Sylla returned to Côte d’Ivoire to build for the African market. With Yelen, he’s turning WhatsApp and Instagram conversations into structured storefronts, helping social sellers manage payments, customers, and operations from one platform.

In much of Africa, commerce has moved from traditional websites to more informal engagements such as chats. From WhatsApp to Instagram DMs, many small businesses sell products through conversations, juggling orders, payments, and customer interactions manually.

For Ibrahima Sylla and Christian Okoth, founders of Yelen, this process presented an opportunity. Launched in June 2025 and headquartered in Côte d’Ivoire, Yelen is positioning itself as an all-in-one platform for social sellers, combining storefronts, payments, and customer management into a single system.

In less than a year, the startup has grown to thousands of users across multiple African markets.

What Yelen is building

Yelen is a platform designed primarily for merchants who sell via messaging apps and social media platforms. Sellers can manage orders originating from WhatsApp, Facebook, and an Instagram integration that lets them import posts directly into their storefronts.

At its core, the product enables users to create an online storefront, collect payments, and manage customers and sales cycles, all within a single platform.

The platform supports payments via card, mobile money, and other methods across 20 African countries. Beyond payments and storefronts, Yelen also integrates tools for automating sales responses and managing customer interactions across social channels.

However, Sylla says the broader ambition goes beyond these core features.

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“The long-term vision is to build a full ecosystem where sellers can manage their entire business lifecycle, from conversations to transactions, within one platform,” Sylla says. “Even for products such as tools for sourcing goods from China and upcoming logistics features.”

From experimentation to product-market fit

Before landing on the current product, Sylla experimented with multiple ideas after leaving his previous employer, Google, in May 2024. Prior to that, he also worked as a sales manag...