Liveet is powering seamless guest experiences for events in Africa

Liveet, an events technology company, builds AI-powered guest and access management software for events. The company currently operates in Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania, and says it has powered more than 500 events and managed over 200,000 guests to date.

Founded in 2024, the company pairs CEO Dayo Popoola, who spent 12 years in sales and business development at uLesson and Teachmint, with CTO Kolapo Obanewa, a software engineer who has built software applications at ECI and Zoom.

Both are two-time founders and actually founded an earlier events startup called Livvi in 2019, a virtual reality platform that streamed concerts for Burna Boy and Wizkid, before the pandemic ended live events and the business with them.

Liveet is deliberately event agnostic. It runs weddings, birthdays, naming ceremonies, book launches and funerals on the same infrastructure it uses for conferences, trade fairs, exhibitions, concerts and public events. “There’s nothing that unites human beings more than events,” Popoola says. “Our bet is on humanity and our ability to just continue to organise around that.”

Most organisers still spread guest management across a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp broadcast, a payments app and a printed sheet at the door. Liveet’s position is that this is one problem rather than four. Whether a host expects 200 guests at a celebration or 2,000 delegates at a summit, the questions are identical. Who was invited, who responded, who has arrived, and what should happen once they are inside.

“Guests form opinions about events long before the programme begins,” Popoola has written. “Not during the keynote. Not during the entertainment. But at the very first interaction, registration.”

Invitations are digital and personalised, and go out by WhatsApp, SMS and pre-recorded voice call as well as email, a choice made for local conditions rather than convenience. “People have a lot of unread emails,” Popoola says. “Their WhatsApp messages, they read everything the moment it comes in.” Hosts track responses in real time rather than chasing guests individually.

At the entrance, Liveet engineered its own self-service kiosk. Guests check in with a QR scan, facial recognition, an NFC tap or an access code, and the machine prints their badge or wristband in four seconds, against manual check-in times the company estimates at up to seven minutes per attendee. “People need to get to events and feel like they are important, and that’s what those machines do,” Popoola says. “There’s no long queues, no duplicate ticketing, it just works.”

Much of what happens next lives in the Liveet mobile app. Delegates browse who else is attending, express interest in meeting someone, and schedule one-to-one meetings during the event, with rooms managed inside the same system. For conferences and trade fairs, that turns exhibitor and buyer contact from a matter of chance into something arranged in advance.

The app also handles lead capture. Rather than collecting business cards or writing down details by hand at a stand, exhibitors scan the QR code on a visitor’s badge and capture their contact information instantly. Popoola says it has been one of the most enthusiastically received additions at recent events in Nairobi.

The platform also generates visa invitation letters automatically for delegates travelling in from other countries, along with certificates of participation once an event closes. Both came from organisers raising the same requests repeatedly.

After the event, Find My Face uses AI to surface every photograph a guest appears in from the shared album, so nobody scrolls through hundreds of images looking for themselves. Guests tend to post what they find, which brings the event organic reach it did not pay for.

Liveet’s clients include United Bank for Africa, Flour Mills of Nigeria, the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, Lagos Business School, Boston Consulting Group and CASIO. Big Cabal Media runs both Moonshot and Nairalife on the platform, and NTV Kenya, the Africa MICE Expo, Sarit Expo Centre in Nairobi and Rotary are also clients. The company says more than six in ten clients either return for another event or refer someone else.

“We believe the future is not fewer events, it is better ones,” Popoola says. Liveet says it intends to begin operating in Europe next year.