Cape Town-based AI software startup Tennsa has raised pre-seed funding from Oakvale Invest to scale its platform and accelerate its push to help businesses move from fragmented legacy workflows to agentic intelligence.
The investment makes Tennsa the first company in Oakvale’s portfolio. Oakvale describes itself as Africa’s first AI-focused pre-seed fund.
Founded by Rivar Maharaj, Tennsa develops secure, bespoke AI software designed to help enterprises integrate artificial intelligence into their existing operations, rather than forcing businesses to replace the systems they already use.
The company is tackling what it sees as a growing problem among businesses: not a lack of data, but a lack of coherence.
Accounting information may sit in one system, inventory in another, customer relationships in a third, while critical communications are spread across email and chat. Each system provides part of the picture, leaving operators to reconcile information manually and determine which issues require attention.
Tennsa’s platform is designed to connect those systems and interpret them as a single operating picture.
Its Tennsa OS acts as an always-on intelligence layer across business systems including accounting, inventory, CRM, email, calendars and banking. Every morning, the platform produces a briefing highlighting what changed, what is at risk and what requires action.
Users can then investigate specific issues through conversations grounded in the underlying business data.
The company says its AI is designed to avoid fabricating information when the relevant data is unavailable, instead grounding its responses in the actual invoices, orders, communications and other records connected to the platform.
Tennsa also takes a different approach to traditional data projects by integrating with business systems at source rather than requiring companies to first consolidate their information into a central data warehouse.
That approach is intended to shorten deployment times and allow businesses to begin using the platform within days of connecting their systems.
Tennsa is initially focused on the South African market and has built integrations for local and widely used business platforms including IQ Retail, Sage, Xero, PayFast and Yoco. The company also says its technology is designed around South African regulatory requirements, including the Protection of Personal Information Act and data-sovereignty considerations.
Beyond Tennsa OS, the company provides AI strategy and guidance, custom AI development and integration, and AI training.
The startup is also backed by Google for Startups.
The investment comes as enterprises increasingly move beyond experimenting with standalone generative AI tools and begin looking at ways to embed AI into core business processes.
For Oakvale, Tennsa represents the first investment in a portfolio being built around artificial intelligence at the earliest stages of company formation. For Maharaj and his team, the capital provides an opportunity to scale Tennsa’s technology and its vision of turning the software businesses already use into a coherent source of intelligence.
The broader ambition is to make AI less of an additional tool for businesses to manage and more of an intelligence layer operating across the systems they already depend on.