Nairobi-based Triply told TDN that its platform now serves more than 500 travel businesses across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia and Malawi, a footprint its own press release described only as East Africa. The company says it is scaling beyond the continent but did not give details.
Founded in 2021 by Peter Wachira and Collins Muthinja, Triply sells what it calls a travel operating system for agencies and tour operators. It covers quotations and AI-assisted itineraries, flight and hotel booking, customer management, collections, wallets and supplier payments. The company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, and Kenyan media reported at the time that it received US$500,000 in backing, described as the accelerator’s first travel technology investment in Africa.
The commercial case rests on payments. Triply told TDN that it issues the virtual cards itself, and that agencies use them to pay international suppliers instead of sending bank SWIFT transfers. The company says this cuts transaction costs by more than 50 percent. It explained that the saving lies in the transactional charges of running a virtual card compared with a SWIFT payment, but it did not share the fee baseline, so the comparison covers charges and not total cost. It also told TDN that every active client uses its payments features, and that the platform can process anything from one dollar to millions.
Behind the cards sits a May 2026 partnership with Choice Microfinance Bank. Triply told TDN that Choice provides a bank-as-a-service solution under which customer funds are held securely at the bank. In practice, Triply is the software and payments layer and the regulated institution holds the money. That structure is common in African fintech, and it is the right one to ask regulators about.
Chargebacks are the other selling point. Triply told TDN that its proprietary technology protects partner businesses, including cardholder details, and that it works in the background to help merchants win when a chargeback is raised. It was direct about the limit of that promise: when a dispute is lost, the travel business still bears the cost. Its release cited a Kenyan operator with US$8,000 at stake in a dispute that Triply helped contest. That is dispute support, not insurance, and the difference matters to any agency weighing the risk.
Triply also points to an Africa Sustainable Futures Awards 2025 win in the tourism category and a Pyne Awards Africa 2026 award for Wachira. In August 2026 it worked with the Kenya Association of Travel Agents to train agents on the Kenyan coast.
For TDN’s readers, the interesting question is not the software. African agencies lose margin on cross-border supplier payments, and a card-and-bank model that bypasses SWIFT could change that arithmetic. But the case stays unproven until Triply shows volumes, discloses its fee baseline and makes clear who regulates which part of the chain. Until then, this is a credible idea and the agencies that gain most will be those that test the numbers against their own supplier costs.
