About MAANTA
MAANTA makes the deals inside a shopping mall visible before you walk in, and verifiable after you walk out.
Shops publish offers from a phone. Shoppers see them in one live feed, claim one, and receive a 6-digit code. Staff verify the code at the counter, the shopper pays the shop in person, and MAANTA charges the shop KES 30 for that verified redemption.
That loop is the entire product.
What MAANTA does not do
It is quicker to describe MAANTA by what it refuses to be.
We do not process payments.
There is no checkout in MAANTA. Money moves at the till, between a shopper and a shop, exactly as it did before we existed.
We do not deliver anything.
The shopper walks in. That is the point.
We do not host reviews or star ratings.
A deal rises because people redeemed it, not because people rated it.
We do not take a percentage of any sale.
KES 30 is KES 30 whether the basket is KES 200 or KES 20,000.
We do not sell shopper data.
We do not sell personal data. We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers, and we do not share it with other malls.
We are not a marketplace.
We do not stand between a shop and its customer, and we do not want to.
Every one of those is a decision we intend to keep, not a feature we have not got to yet.
Why Nairobi malls, and why in person
Mall retail in Nairobi already works. Shoppers come, shops sell, money changes hands at a counter. Nothing about that transaction is broken and nothing about it needs disrupting.
What fails is information. A shop runs a good offer and tells the forty people in a WhatsApp group and whoever happens to look at the chalkboard. Two floors up, someone who would have bought it never finds out. In a place like Eastleigh — hundreds of shops behind hundreds of similar shutters — that gap is expensive for everyone standing on either side of it.
So MAANTA fixes the information problem and leaves the transaction alone. We are not trying to move mall retail online. We are trying to make the mall legible.
Verified redemption is the only signal we trust
Everything on MAANTA ranks on one thing: a code that a member of shop staff verified at a counter, with the shopper standing there.
Not impressions. Not clicks. Not stars, which can be bought, farmed, or left by someone who never entered the shop.
It is a deliberately narrow signal, and narrow is the point. It is the only event in this business that is expensive to fake and equally meaningful to all three sides — a shopper who walked in, a shop that made a sale, and a mall that got footfall it can account for.
How we make money
Shops pay KES 30 when a shopper's code is verified at their counter. That is the core of the business.
A shop that wants more than one live offer can take Elite. Its monthly price is not set yet. Elite shops can also buy a boost — top of the feed for 24 hours — at KES 500.
- Shoppers pay nothing. There is no paid tier, no subscription, and nowhere to enter a card.
- Malls pay nothing. Operator partnerships are not billed.
- We take no percentage and sell no data. Our revenue does not rise because a basket was large or because we learned something about a shopper.
If nobody walks into a shop, we earn nothing. That is deliberate. It keeps our incentive pointed at the same thing the merchant already cares about.
Where we are today
Last updated 31 July 2026.
MAANTA opens first at BBS Mall, Eastleigh — our first mall, and the only one so far.
We are in one mall. We have not opened a second, and we would rather do the first one properly than announce three.
We have no outside investment to point at and no awards to list. What we have is a working loop, shops using it, and people in the mall rather than a support address.
If any of that changes, this page changes with it.
Who is building it
Mohamed Elmi — Founder
Born in Norway in 1997 to Somali parents who arrived as asylum seekers, and raised in the UK from 2003. He read Politics and Economics at Aston University and moved back to Norway in 2024. MAANTA is his first company.
Eastleigh is the commercial centre of the Somali diaspora in East Africa — a market he has a claim on by descent, and one most founders cannot read. Studying politics and economics is what gave the thing he already recognised a shape: the shops work and the prices work, and what is missing is not capital or demand but information. Someone two floors up never learns what is on offer.
Every node MAANTA opens is staffed. A node manager and up to 4 agents work the mall: the agents work the floor with shoppers and merchants — onboarding shops, setting up staff accounts, and helping at the counter, and the node manager coordinates with mall management so the node runs smoothly, and owns the relationship with the operator. Activation happens in person rather than by email — sitting with a shop owner while they publish their first deal, and staying at the counter until a real code has been verified. Most of what we have learned came from that, not from analytics.
Talk to us
Merchants, mall operators, press and anyone doing due diligence — the fastest route is the contact page, and it goes to a person.
MAANTA APP, BBS Mall, Eastleigh, Nairobi, Kenya