When Cognito Systems began as Six Labs, it wasn’t yet clear what shape the company would eventually take. What was clear, however, was its founder’s obsession with building technology that could stand shoulder to shoulder with global products without losing sight of African realities.
Moore Dagogo-Hart, CEO and founder of Cognito Systems, tells Techpoint Africa that after scaling Zap Africa, a product of Six Labs, to over 50,000 users and $500,000 in funding, he knew it was the right time to expand beyond blockchain and cryptocurrency infrastructure to artificial intelligence.
“This year, when Zap Africa gained 10,000 users in a day in January, I think I realised that Six Labs had changed, and it was time for us to have a new identity. We went from not really knowing what we were doing as a startup, while still building for different companies, to building a product with lots of users and understanding scale and systems better,” Dagogo-Hart recalls.
With that, Cognito Systems was born as an infrastructure company building artificial intelligence and blockchain systems for businesses, with a clear ambition to ensure Africa is not left behind in the global intelligence race.
From Goldman Sachs to founder
Dagogo-Hart’s journey to becoming a founder began with his 2021 exit from Goldman Sachs. Although he was certain he wanted to build something in the crypto space, he was unsure what it would be, which led him on a journey of experimentation.
His first attempt was Solarsoft, a startup through which he launched Nebula Wallet, an NFT and crypto wallet. But things didn’t go as planned. Apple removed Nebula from the App Store, and not long after, the crypto market crashed in 2022. Dagogo-Hart decided to shut down Nebula and close Solarsoft entirely.
Still, returning to Goldman Sachs or pursuing another job was not an option. So, when Moore got the opportunity to build Zap Africa, a crypto exchange, with a co-founder, he took it.
That decision led to the creation of Six Labs, the company that built Zap Africa’s underlying infrastructure. Six Labs would later evolve into Cognito Systems.
What Cognito Systems does
Cognito Systems builds AI and blockchain systems that help businesses operate more efficiently.
“Cognito Systems is an artificial intelligence and blockchain systems company. We basically build infrastructure and systems for AI and blockchain to help businesses improve,” Dagogo-Hart explains.
This means building software that automates time-consuming or inefficient business processes. On the AI side, Cognito Systems builds AI infrastructure that can be applied across multiple business teams, including customer support and finance, while its blockchain infrastructure ensures security, transparency, and user control.
Its most prominent product so far is Martha AI, an AI-powered customer support system designed to help companies respond to customers faster and at scale.
“Martha AI talks to your customers, responds in seconds, and basically takes the load off your customer support team.
Why Martha AI became Cognito’s first product
Cognito Systems’ first internal product emerged from two places: client work and internal pain points.
After the rebrand, Cognito Systems secured contracts, including one to build a phone-calling platform for a Canadian non-profit. But while working on that project, the team realised they could build something bigger.
“Instead of building just a phone calling platform, we could build a full customer support platform because of all the customer support issues we were having at Zap Africa.”
So, they built Martha AI to automate customer service, manage tickets, and respond to customers in seconds.
Martha AI automates customer service, enabling support teams to handle conversations and manage tickets while freeing them from repetitive responses, so they can focus on more strategic customer support tasks.
Cognito Systems’ edge
As AI becomes increasingly integrated in everyday work, Cognito Systems is primarily targeting early-stage startups that are still figuring out how operations should work at scale.
The company is not limited to one sector. Its target customers span fintech, real estate tech, edtech, and healthtech.
Dagogo-Hart believes Cognito Systems’ biggest advantage lies in how quickly Martha AI can be deployed, its localisation, and its ability to simulate human interactions.
“Martha AI is the first customer support chatbot that you can integrate in 60 seconds.”
The tool is trained on Internet data and on real customer support conversations from Zap Africa, which provide context for how customer support should work and some of the questions customers typically ask.
The system is also designed to understand local languages and context better than most Western models.
“We use local models like YarnGPT that help us interpret local languages clearly and more accurately than ChatGPT, Claude, and all other Western models.”
The future Cognito Systems is building toward
For Dagogo-Hart, Cognito Systems is ultimately about ensuring Africa is not left behind in the AI era.
“The main reason for building Cognito is to basically take Africa into this new age of intelligence.”
Martha AI is only the beginning. The long-term plan is for AI to touch every part of a business.
“We want Martha AI to help your developers, your finance teams, your legal teams. Every business unit can be enhanced drastically by artificial intelligence.”
Cognito Systems wants to be one of the companies leading the shift to building intelligence systems not just for Africa, but from Africa.
