Nairobi, since 2020
A small team that builds the part other people find hard.
Noria builds payment systems, operations software, and AI workflows for businesses in Kenya and East Africa - and runs more than five products of its own on exactly the same rails.
- Since 2020
- building software
- 5+ products
- we build, run, and bill on
- Nairobi
- working across East Africa
Who you work with
You deal with the people doing the work.
I am Joseph Gitonga. For more than eight years I have built software that moves money or makes decisions - card and bank payments at Stax Payments in the US, AI systems at Turing, and payments, messaging and operations for businesses across Kenya.
I started Noria in 2020 because too many businesses here were paying for systems that looked finished in the demo and came apart at month end. Today I lead a small engineering team, and the people on your first call are the people who build your system and answer for it afterwards.
Write to me directly at [email protected].
- 8+ years
- building software that moves money
- 20M+
- card and bank transactions a month at Stax Payments
- Hundreds
- of Kenyan businesses on systems we built
Stax Payments
Software Engineer, 2021 - 2024
A US payments company processing card and bank payments for merchants - more than 20 million transactions a month. I worked across billing, settlements and reconciliation: charging each merchant the right fees, making sure every settlement paid out what it should, and proving the ledger and the bank agreed at the end of each cycle. I also built fraud checks into the payment flow that cut fraudulent transactions by about 70%.
Turing
AI engineer, 2024 - 2026
Turing builds AI systems for enterprise clients. I built the environments AI agents are trained and tested in, and the controls that let an agent act on real systems without doing damage - the same line we hold when we put AI into your business: where it saves work, and where a person still decides.
Noria
Founder, 2020 - today
More than five products of our own, including BillGrid, which bills and collects from recurring customers, SecurePass, which runs visitor management for shared buildings, and SiteBooks, which has carried more than 100 construction projects and over 50 million shillings of client money since 2022.
How we got here
Building our own software changed how we build everyone else's
It is one thing to ship a client project and move on. It is another to be the person awake when a payment callback stops arriving on the last day of the month.
Noria started in 2020, building systems for businesses in Nairobi that had outgrown spreadsheets and the tools they started with. The work that kept coming back was always the same shape: money arriving through M-PESA, and nobody able to prove that what the paybill received matched what the books said.
So we built BillGrid, first for ourselves. It bills our customers, reconciles our own statements, and chases our own arrears. Every retry, duplicate callback, and mismatched deposit was ours to fix on our own time. That is the difference between having read about a failure mode and having lost a weekend to one.
SiteBooks came from the same instinct pointed at construction - contractors running sites in Kenya for clients who are in London or Toronto and cannot come and look.
The result is that when we tell you a system will hold up under real money, we are not making a claim about our process. We are telling you what ours already survives.
What we have built for others
Payments
M-PESA, card and bank integrations for hundreds of Kenyan businesses - collections, payouts, refunds, and the reconciliation that proves them.
WhatsApp and SMS
WhatsApp automation and bulk SMS tied to what the business is actually doing - receipts, reminders, arrears, and replies after hours. Before Noria, Joseph rebuilt the SMS delivery system at Afrinet Telecom, carrying more than 3 million messages a month, and halved how long they took to arrive.
Websites and business email
The groundwork most of our system clients started on: a site that works on a phone, a domain they own, and email that lands in the inbox.
Servers and infrastructure
Hosting, backups, monitoring and releases we run for our own products and for clients - restores tested, not assumed.
How we work
Four things we will not trade away
These are not values on a wall. Each one has cost us money at least once, which is the only test that means anything.
We run what we sell
BillGrid bills our own customers on M-PESA every month. When we say we know what breaks under real money, it is because it broke for us first, at our own cost.
The business problem, then the technology
We scope around what is actually costing you time or money. The stack is an implementation detail, and we will not sell you one you do not need.
Written to be handed over
Tests, documentation, and a codebase another engineer can pick up. Your data exports, your accounts stay in your name, and the off-boarding checklist is written before you need it.
We will talk you out of things
A template instead of a build. BillGrid instead of a quote. Nothing at all, if the audit comes back clean. Every lane on this site names the case where you should not buy it.
Fit
Who we suit, and who we do not
We would rather you worked this out on this page than three weeks into a project.
A good fit
- Money moves through the system, and being wrong at month end is expensive
- There is a named person who can make decisions and answer questions
- You want the thing maintained after launch, not just delivered
- You would rather hear an honest no than an agreeable yes
A poor fit
- Nobody owns the project and the requirements change with whoever is in the room
- The goal is the cheapest possible version and nothing after that
- You need a large team on site from next week - we are small, deliberately
- The decision has already been made and you want an engineer to agree with it
Want to see if we are a fit?
Tell us what is slowing the business down. We will recommend the right next step, the expected timeline, and a budget range - usually within 24 hours.
- Free 30-minute call
- Scope, timeline, and budget range
- An honest answer about fit
Or reach us directly
Weekdays, and we answer the same day.