Every mapping app operating in Nigeria today was built somewhere else first. Google Maps was designed for markets with clean postal codes and stable street grids, and was later adapted for Nigeria. What3words solved part of the addressing problem without changing the underlying mapping layer. None of them was built on the assumption that informal settlements, unnamed streets and landmark-based directions would be the default.

Maiaddy’s answer is Maimaps, a navigation platform that lets users search, share and navigate to locations across Nigeria using Loccodes, a proprietary, patented addressing system the company says was built to give every place in the country a digital identity. The company is rolling out the full stack from day one: a consumer app, a developer API and SDKs, all at once. Its argument is that the gap is not a corner case that was missed, but a market that no one has fully claimed.

Explaining the vision behind the project, Obinna Onyejeli, founder and CEO of Maiaddy, said: “We built Loccodes to give every place in Nigeria a digital identity. Maimaps is what makes that identity useful every day. Our goal is simple: make it easier for people, businesses, and digital services to identify and reach any location in Nigeria.”

A rejection by NIPOST that helped shape Maimaps

The project did not begin as a business plan. It began as a rejection. When Maiaddy built the Loccode system in late 2024, the obvious first step was to bring Nigeria’s postal service on board. NIPOST is, on paper, exactly the kind of institution a national location-identity system should run through. Maiaddy therefore offered it a free API, with unlimited use in perpetuity and no catch attached.

Nothing came back. “We tried various ways,” Onyejeli said, describing his attempts to reach out. “Emailed the postmaster-general, tagged them, NIPOST and the ministry aggressively on social media posts, and even used third parties. None worked.” The logic behind the offer was that if NIPOST adopted Loccodes, every mapping platform operating in Nigeria would eventually have to integrate with Maiaddy’s system, rather than the other way round.

“The idea was that if they adopted it, mapping platforms would have to integrate with us,” the CEO said. “So we decided to build a mapping platform ourselves, and it’s been quite the journey.”

That silence matters, because it complicates any reading of the launch as a simple example of a company generously building public infrastructure out of goodwill. Maiaddy wanted a government partner to distribute Loccodes at national scale and did not get one. It then built the distribution layer itself and, in the process, ended up owning the entire stack: identity system, mapping app, API and SDKs.

If NIPOST had responded in 2024, Maimaps as a standalone product might never have been necessary. In that scenario, mapping platforms would likely have integrated with the postal service’s version of Loccodes instead. As things stand, Maiaddy is the gatekeeper of a system a government agency had first refusal on and passed up. Whether that was due to inertia or choice is something no one outside NIPOST can confirm.

Maimaps has been in development for close to a year, and the company has been unusually open about why it took that long. “Building mapping technology is far more complex than most people realise,” Onyejeli said. “Unlike many software products, you’re not just building an application; you are building infrastructure.”

Over the past 12 months, that meant designing the core architecture, developing GIS capabilities from scratch and building mapping services that could hold up at scale before anyone outside the company touched them. Working with location data at that volume created challenges around accuracy, performance and consistency, the kind of issues that do not become visible until real usage begins. “We also spent significant time validating assumptions and refining the product rather than rushing something incomplete to market,” he added.

The team has worked together across at least eight products and location projects before this one, and Onyejeli says that experience is the company’s real qualification for the problem. “We’ve experienced first-hand the frustration of inaccurate addresses, difficult navigation, and unreliable location data, particularly across Nigeria,” he said. “We’re combining modern technologies with mapping infrastructure to create a platform that understands locations the way people actually describe them.”

Where Maiaddy expects revenue to come from

Maiaddy’s expected revenue model says a lot about how it sees the market. The company does not expect consumer downloads to be the main source of income. Instead, it expects businesses integrating its APIs and enterprise services into logistics, delivery, transportation, e-commerce, emergency services, real estate, field operations, utilities, financial services and government workflows to become the primary revenue driver over time. It also plans premium tiers for organisations that need more advanced analytics and routing tools.

“For now, our focus is on growing the ecosystem, working closely with early adopters, and ensuring we’re solving meaningful problems before aggressively monetising,” Onyejeli said. Pricing for those enterprise tiers has not been finalised or disclosed.

Maiaddy is treating Africa’s mapping gap as underpriced infrastructure, and says it is already in early conversations with logistics, financial services and public sector prospects. That focus also helps explain why the company is emphasising integration rather than standalone consumer adoption: if address quality remains uneven, the people most likely to feel the cost first are the businesses and agencies that depend on accurate delivery, routing and location sharing.

Coverage is national in ambition from day one, though the company is clear that this does not mean uniform quality everywhere. “Beginning from today, users across Nigeria will be able to access the platform, although we expect some regions to have richer data and more features as we continue expanding and improving our coverage,” Onyejeli said. “Mapping is never truly finished; it’s a living system that continuously evolves as new locations are added and data quality improves.”

Pilot testing and product feedback

Asked whether the platform had been tested before launch, Onyejeli said yes. “During development we’ve worked closely with prospective users and businesses to validate ideas, gather feedback, and refine the product experience,” he said.

The biggest lesson from that process, according to him, was that “organisations don’t just need maps, they need reliable location intelligence that integrates into their existing workflows.” Businesses cared as much about accuracy, speed and ease of integration as they did about navigation itself, and that feedback helped shape the product roadmap.

Although Maimaps is designed as a horizontal platform, Onyejeli said early traction will likely come from sectors where a wrong pin drop carries real operational cost: logistics and delivery, transportation, e-commerce, emergency services, real estate, field operations, utilities, financial services and government. Individual consumers are also part of the plan, mainly through easier navigation and more accurate location sharing, but the long-term ambition goes beyond any single use case.

“Our long-term vision is to become foundational location infrastructure that developers, businesses, governments, and everyday users can all build upon,” Onyejeli said.

What the team says it learned

Asked what a year of building taught the team, Onyejeli said the lesson was not mainly about GIS or API architecture. It was about how Nigerians actually describe where they are.

“People don’t naturally communicate locations using perfect addresses,” he said. “They use landmarks, neighbourhoods, familiar buildings, and local context. Building a map platform with people who understand those patterns is incredibly important.”

The company also described patience as an underrated startup discipline. “It’s tempting for startups to launch quickly, but investing time in getting the fundamentals right has resulted in a much stronger platform than if we had rushed to market,” Onyejeli said.

Onyejeli’s broader point — that Nigeria has been trying to build a digital economy on top of a broken map — is not new, but it remains a useful diagnosis. Several African startups have already tackled parts of the problem, from digital addressing to last-mile logistics data. What is unusual here is the attempt to launch the consumer app, the developer API and the SDK ecosystem at the same time, rather than sequencing them across separate funding rounds.