Google indexed the internet. We're indexing the economy it can't see.
We turn everyday movement into verified, live intelligence about physical markets: what is there, what it costs, and what people will actually buy. Nobody surveys anyone. People play a game on FOONA, and the truth falls out into Pikaboo.
No surveys. The game is the survey.
A brand asks in Pikaboo. People moving through that street answer bounded questions for rewards on FOONA. AI settles it. The brand allocates, and the return comes back verified.
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1 A brand asks Pikaboo
"Will they buy me in Cape Town?" One question it is already paying to guess about, framed in Pikaboo.
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2 The market plays FOONA
People moving through that street answer bounded questions for rewards on FOONA. Photo, place, price, sentiment.
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3 AI settles it Timbuk2
Timbuk2 quality-checks, de-duplicates and trust-ranks every record, with human review kept in the loop where it is still required. Unproven records never ship.
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4 The brand allocates Pikaboo
Spend goes where demand actually is, and the return comes back verified in Pikaboo.
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Abidjan: 219 approved submissions in three hours, a quarter of the duplicates caught automatically. Every accepted observation strengthens one governed evidence state, auditable today and refreshed for the next decision.
Online, brands measure every click. Offline, they are guessing with billions.
Brands can see every click. They still can't see the street. We uncovered 80% of the shops no map had ever recorded.
- Meta
- Google Ads
- TikTok
- Amazon
$9bn
R170bn a year of informal trade. South Africa alone.
The same measurement gap appears across emerging markets.
Informal trade, NielsenIQ 2026. Shop-coverage figure from own field records, Tlhabane 2026.
We mapped a city in a foreign country, in another language, in one afternoon.
Same engine, same app, same settlement rules. It works, it travels, and it gets cheaper with density.
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The record said 18 spaza shops listed. Around 13% of the businesses we found existed in any digital record.
We found 308 verified businesses in 6.3 km² in two weeks, with usable GPS on every record and photographic evidence on 98.7%.
308 verified businesses -
The record said A city we had never worked in, in another language, with no prior presence. Decision to live in-country: one day.
We found Six players, three hours from start to settled: 219 approved submissions, 76 unique billboards, a quarter of the duplicates caught automatically.
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The record said Roughly 80% of the businesses in Tlhabane were absent from Google Maps.
We found 149 businesses verified in three days in Tlhabane. Umlazi Central, a denser corridor, ran in one day at a third less per record.
149 businesses in three days
settled answers, every one photographed, located and time-stamped
16 missions · six corridors · two countries · 50+ people paid directly for the evidence
Every generation costs less and sees more.
Clipboards, then camera cars, then phones, then scanners on the shelf. Each generation saw more of the physical world for less. Ours runs on the phones people already carry, pays them to play, and is walking toward the glasses on your face.
A by-product of a walk
Head-worn capture removes the last act of effort. Nobody stops and aims. In proof of concept now.
- R1.71 R0.50
- cost per verified answer
- 50,240 1M
- verified answers by December
- 680 10,000
- people earning from a walk
Left is measured. Right is a target, not a result.
Niantic sold the game for $3.5 billion and kept the map.
There was never a Pokémon in a township. That gap is the whole company. Niantic put a phone in hundreds of millions of hands and got a planet walked and recorded; the durable asset was the map, and that map still thins where the formal economy ends. FOONA starts there.
“We are building the ground-truth layer for Africa's informal economies. One day, we'll feed it into your model.”
A precedent, not a partnership. No agreement is claimed.
Physical distribution intelligence
Census shows where they sleep.
Not where they transact.
Conventional siting data sees the formal grid. timbuk2 field-verifies the informal economy — where most of Africa actually trades — block by block, so you deploy against real demand instead of the member list.
- 8%
- of live trade falls in “low-data” zones your data can’t see
- 15
- greenfield territories surfaced per corridor
- 3×
- partner ROI in pilot corridors vs. list-led siting
The world already moves. We turn that movement into intelligence.
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Capture becomes ambient
Nobody stops and aims. They walk.
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Cost per answer collapses
More evidence per paid hour. Not free, far cheaper.
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Africa is the proving ground
Abidjan is the proving ground; the same evidence protocol is designed to travel.
Three continents walked and a million answers settled by December 2026. Targets, not results.
Bring us the market decision you need to defend.
Four ways enterprises buy the same verified evidence.
- Precision Marketing Plan, measure and prove out-of-home campaigns with independent, field-verified audience measurement. For media owners, agencies & advertisers
- Field Execution Know where to deploy field teams — and prove what happened. For distribution, financial services & field-force leaders
- Retail Media & Activation Turn retail and township demand into verified, brand-funded sales. For brands, FMCG & retail media networks
- Audience Intelligence On-demand, ground-verified location and audience data for any geography. For brands, enterprises, public sector & researchers
Out in the world
The team, the rooms and the streets where the evidence gets made.
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Sea Point, Cape Town -
AWS Summit -
5,000 points on the wall, Cape Town office -
With AWS, Cape Town -
Africa Tech Festival -
AWS Skills Centre
We started where everyone already was.
timbuk2 began with a simple idea: the people who live in Africa's townships understand them best. We turned mapping into a game, first over WhatsApp and now in the FOONA app, and paid people for evidence about their own streets: spaza shops, taxi ranks, billboards, the corners where trade actually happens.
Those records became the ground truth behind Pikaboo, and the reason our platform could carry a national operator's planning in production for eighteen months. Today we sell that proof directly to the brands, banks and public bodies whose money cannot move into a market it cannot see.
Geospatial data scientists and creators who already built this for Shoprite and Takealot.
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Operators who have built this before, across Shoprite, Takealot, WhereIsMyTransport and the African Union's market-insights atlas.
Board, advisors & legal
Trusted & procurement-ready
Enterprise-ready from day one.
- AWS
- Ninety One
- Endeavor SA
- Exxaro
- Kaleo
- Shoprite
- Takealot
- WhereIsMyTransport
- African Union
- POPIA-safe
- B-BBEE Level 1 · ESD
- AWS-backed
- InfoSec summary
- Fixed-scope SOW
Featured in Fast Company · Bizcommunity · Africa Tech Festival
The starter pilot
Where should your first team go, what should they prioritise, and why?
We answer that in one corridor, in 10–14 working days, for a fixed fee. No open-ended retainer and no platform to adopt — a scoped, verifiable proof you can take straight to your exec committee.
- Scope One corridor
- Timeline 10–14 working days
- Commercials Fixed fee · fixed scope
- A field-verified map of the corridor
- A ranked priority list — where to go first, second, third
- Photo, GPS & timestamp evidence for every point
- Field notes captured on the ground
- A clean data spreadsheet you keep
- A recommended first move, argued from the evidence