Kenyan startup Eyby is tackling a problem few African tech companies have dared to touch: bringing one of the world’s largest and most stubbornly offline industries into the digital age. Building products, from cement and cables to fixtures and fittings, have long moved through phone calls, informal networks and paper catalogues.
Eyby wants to change that with a single trusted marketplace linking manufacturers, distributors, contractors, consultants, retailers and buyers.
Founded in 2025 by Hemal Doshil, Eyby lets manufacturers digitise their product catalogues, gives distributors a wider online reach, and helps buyers discover, compare, source and request quotations for building materials all in one place. The platform remains in private beta, but its early numbers already tell a compelling story.
Roughly 25,000 products spanning 11,000 categories are listed, more than 4,000 users log on monthly, and around 300 quotation requests are processed every month. Participating distributors are moving approximately five million dollars in gross merchandise value through the platform each month.
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Doshil traces the idea back to a clear gap in the construction supply chain. He explained that while other industries have digitised, building products has stayed stuck with disconnected catalogues, manual quotations and fragmented distributor networks.
Manufacturers pour resources into their products but have little say over how those products appear across different sales channels, while buyers waste time hunting for items, comparing specifications and vetting suppliers they can trust.
The company is bootstrapped and backed by Metsec Cables, a Kenyan manufacturer with more than 200 employees, a relationship that Eyby says gives it room to build sustainable technology without chasing short-term returns.
That patience extends to how Eyby plans to make money. Rather than leaning on transaction commissions, the startup is focused first on growing its ecosystem, with future revenue expected from premium subscriptions, advertising and value-added digital services once the platform scales.
Much of Eyby’s engineering effort has gone into solving a less visible but critical problem: standardising fragmented product data across thousands of SKUs from hundreds of manufacturers.
Doshil described how product information in the sector is often inconsistent, incomplete, duplicated or structured differently from one supplier to the next, making it nearly impossible for buyers to compare accurately or for search engines to make sense of it at all.
Eyby’s response is a structured building-product knowledge graph built on a detailed taxonomy that standardises technical specifications, attributes, categories and relationships across brands, effectively creating a shared digital language for the industry.
That knowledge graph now powers AI-driven product discovery, equivalency recommendations and technical comparisons, and Eyby considers it the company’s biggest competitive edge.
Kenya remains Eyby’s core market for now, where it continues signing up manufacturers, distributors and professional buyers. But the platform was built with scale in mind, and the plan is to expand progressively across other African markets before eventually courting customers globally.
Industry momentum may be on Eyby’s side, since construction supply chains are digitising and buyers are increasingly demanding transparency and better procurement tools.
Doshil’s bet is that the sector needs more than another marketplace, and that pairing a robust product knowledge graph with a trusted trading platform lays the digital groundwork to modernise how building products are discovered, compared and sourced across Africa, and eventually the wider global construction industry.
