Jasco and Freshworks move to expand access to advanced customer service tech across Africa. Freshworks is teaming with Jasco to push its customer service platform into African markets, a region most enterprise support vendors have largely ignored. A dispatch from Capital FM Africa - filed Aug 29, 2026, its note Aug 31, 2026 Freshworks' Africa reseller push is a pricing story, not a technology one. On August 29, 2026, Jasco Communications - a Nairobi-based software reseller - announced a partnership with Freshworks to widen access to unified customer service tools for African businesses, with the launch made at a corporate partner dinner in Kenya. The pitch, laid out by Jasco chairman Patrick Muthui, business development head Bonface Kiogora and lead engineer Precious Viata, is a single dashboard that merges WhatsApp, email, SMS and social messages into one customer history, sold as a cloud-native alternative to enterprise CRM for small and medium businesses. M-KOPA, the pay-as-you-go asset financing firm operating across the continent and serving more than 10 million customers, was cited as a reference customer through operations manager Purity Mwema. What is actually being announced? Jasco will resell and locally support Freshworks' unified inbox to African SMEs, promising days-not-months setup and usage-based pricing instead of upfront licensing. There's no new product here - this is a distribution and localisation deal. Jasco's value-add is managed implementation and support for a region where Freshworks previously relied on direct or partner-light sales. For a reader evaluating vendors, that means the underlying platform is the same Freshworks stack already reviewed elsewhere; what changes is who answers the phone when something breaks. Why pitch this at SMEs specifically? Because a unified, 360-degree customer view previously required ERP-scale CRM budgets that priced most small African firms out entirely, Jasco argues. That's a real and familiar gap: enterprise CX suites have long assumed enterprise IT teams. Jasco's argument is that consumption pricing and managed deployment remove the two biggest SME blockers - capital outlay and implementation headcount. It's a reasonable thesis, but it's also exactly the pitch every CCaaS reseller makes when entering a new market, and this site has already flagged how thin "polish" claims get when every vendor sounds equally excellent. How solid is the M-KOPA evidence? Thin. The article cites M-KOPA's scale and a $136,054 figure but never states what that number measures, over what period, or against what baseline. M-KOPA's own size (10 million-plus customers) is a company-level metric, not a platform-performance one - it tells you the customer is large, not that the software worked well for them. The dollar figure appears without a denominator: is it monthly savings, a one-off recovery, or something else? Freshworks doesn't define the metric here, and Jasco is the reseller with every incentive to present it favourably. Readers should treat it as a headline, not a benchmark. What should you ask your own vendor before buying in? Ask for the metric's definition, time window and comparison baseline - not just the number - before it goes on a slide. Specifically: what counted as a "resolved" interaction in any cited case study, over what date range, and against what prior system. Also ask what "days not months" actually includes - data migration, agent training, channel API approvals - since those are usually where SME deployments actually stall, regardless of pricing model. Frequently asked questions. Is this a new Freshworks product? No. It's a regional reseller and support partnership; the underlying Freshworks customer service platform is unchanged. Does usage-based pricing mean no lock-in? Not necessarily - pricing model and data portability are separate questions. Ask Jasco directly about export terms and contract minimums. Who is M-KOPA, and does its experience generalise? M-KOPA is a large pay-as-you-go asset financing firm; its scale and use case may not match a smaller SME's needs or budget.

Qure.ai appoints Mihir Bhanushali as Executive Vice President, Global Health. August 26, 2026 | Wednesday | News Seasoned commercial leader to scale early diagnosis, frontline care and Qure.ai's clinical co-pilot Aira. Mumbai-based Qure.ai, an AI technology company focused on healthcare, has announced the appointment of Mihir Bhanushali as Executive Vice President, Global Health, as the company deepens its investment in AI-powered healthcare across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Bhanushali joins Qure.ai from Freshworks, where he was Senior Director, Global Sales. A seasoned commercial leader, he has built and scaled high-growth businesses across global markets, with earlier leadership roles at Rippling and Whatfix spanning sales, go-to-market strategy and commercial transformation. At Qure.ai, Bhanushali will lead the next phase of the company's growth across LMICs, with a focus on Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Latin America. His mandate spans the company's solutions for infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and HIV, and care delivery across frontline health systems. Qure.ai is expanding beyond screening and early diagnosis into broader care delivery. At the centre of this expansion is Aira, Qure.ai's AI doctor and clinical co-pilot for frontline healthcare, which brings clinical intelligence, digital workflows and care coordination closer to the point of care, with applications across primary care, telemedicine, HIV, infectious diseases and pandemic preparedness. Survey box. Is Indian pharma rewriting its acquisition strategy?

Modernising enterprise service management with a SaaS-first, omnichannel platform. First Digital runs a major fashion retailer's enterprise service management on Freshworks' Freshservice, from Azure single sign-on to WhatsApp live chat, across roughly 1 400 agents. The challenge. The retailer mandated a review of its enterprise service management tooling with two clear goals: to mature and expand service management capability across the enterprise, and to secure a sound, future-fit technology investment. It needed a single, scalable SaaS platform that could modernise increasingly manual ways of working and reduce its dependency on bespoke, custom-coded solutions, without compromising on enterprise governance or cost control. The approach. Partnering with First Digital, the retailer selected Freshworks' Freshservice as its strategic ESM platform. The decision was anchored in Freshservice's comprehensive, SaaS-first enterprise capabilities, its potential for rapid time to value and its ability to reduce reliance on in-house development, backed by enterprise-grade vendor commitments covering platform availability, support, dedicated account engagement and product training. Delivery was hands-on and collaborative. The teams met in person at kick-off and at critical milestones, blended in-person and remote work to keep delivery moving, and trained users directly on the retailer's own platform build so the business stayed close to the solution throughout.