Established 2019 · Nairobi, Kenya
We have spent years inside enterprise estates on this continent. The constraints are specific, and they are ours.
Acorn Code Lab has been building software since 2019. For most of that time we grew the way good studios do — quietly, through the people we had already delivered for. That works until the people who should know about you have no way to find out.
So this is the studio written down: what we do, how we work, what we will argue about, and what happens to your systems when the engagement ends. Everything on this site is meant to be the same answer you would get from us in a room.
We work with enterprises across financial services, logistics, insurance and retail — organisations where software failure has consequences beyond a missed sprint. That shapes our defaults. We choose inspectable architecture over interesting architecture, we write things down, and we treat handover as part of the build rather than a favour at the end.
We are an African studio, and that is a technical position as much as a location: intermittent connectivity, low-end devices and regional data residency are our starting assumptions, not late compromises.
7
Years in practice
Since 2019
40+
Systems delivered
Across financial services, logistics, retail
9
Countries operated in
Client systems in production
94%
Client retention
Engagements extended beyond initial term
Principles
- 01
We tell you what we think before you pay us to agree
The most valuable thing a delivery partner offers is a position they will defend. If we think your plan is wrong, you hear it in the first conversation.
- 02
Boring architecture, deliberately chosen
Novelty is a cost paid by whoever operates the system next. We choose the least interesting technology that fully solves the problem.
- 03
Handover is scope, not goodwill
Runbooks, decision records and operator training are part of what we build. A system your team cannot run without us is not finished.
- 04
Built for this market, not adapted to it
Intermittent connectivity, low-end devices and regional data residency are our starting assumptions rather than late-stage compromises.
How we staff
Named leads are fixed for the duration of an engagement and appear in the statement of work, where the commitment is enforceable.
- 01
Led by an engineer, not an account manager
Every engagement has a named technical lead with a decade or more in practice, fixed for the duration and recorded in the statement of work. The person who scopes the work is the person accountable for delivering it.
- 02
No single-person dependencies
A minimum of two engineers are familiar with every system we build. This costs margin on every project and it is not negotiable, because vendor concentration risk is a legitimate concern and the honest answer is to engineer it away.
- 03
Cross-functional by default
Teams carry their own design and delivery capability rather than depending on a central pool. A squad that has to queue for a designer is a squad that ships on someone else’s schedule.
- 04
Staffed to hand over
Runbooks, architecture decision records and operator training are written by the engineers who built the system, as part of delivery. Handover is not a phase at the end that a departing team rushes.
We do not publish a roster. A studio that leads with individual names invites the question of what happens when those individuals leave — and for an enterprise buyer that is the wrong question to be thinking about. The commitment that matters is contractual, not photographic.
A system your team cannot run without us is not finished.
Common questions
What does Acorn Code Lab do?
Acorn Code Lab is an African software studio that builds enterprise software systems for organisations in financial services, logistics, insurance and retail, and operates its own digital products. Typical work includes core system migrations, cloud infrastructure, data and AI platforms, and mobile applications built for intermittent connectivity.
Where is Acorn Code Lab based?
Acorn Code Lab is based in Nairobi, Kenya, and delivers work across East Africa, Nigeria, South Africa and for international clients in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.
What size of organisation does Acorn Code Lab work with?
Acorn Code Lab works with established enterprises and funded scale-ups — organisations where software failure has consequences beyond a missed sprint. Engagements are typically led by an engineer with a decade or more in practice and run from eight weeks to multiple years.