Meet Me Halfway

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Welcome to the 61st edition of Next Capital, where we help you find Africa’s most promising startups, before they get big.

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Startup: Letsgohalf
Location: Nigeria

Lagos is seen as the home of opportunity in Nigeria. But it’s also the country’s most expensive city. For the average young person in Lagos, paying rent, getting groceries, or even making it to work in the morning requires you to constantly do some math: how much you have vs how much things cost.

For many of these people, the solution is to share. Many people live in shared apartments with friends where they split rent and utilities, and carpool with colleagues to save on cab fares. The only problem is this favors people with a strong enough (and willing) social circle.

For those without a social network (which is often most people), sharing might cut their bills but cost them a lot of time and energy in other areas. They have to find someone to share things with, trust this person enough to share costs with them, have the same routines around the cost item (work, rent, food, etc), and figure out the logistics of handling those costs.

This is too much work for many people. So, they swallow the cost of doing life alone instead. But what if they didn’t have to? Last week, we spoke to Tolulope Olonibua, a developer who’s faced this issue and has built something to fix it. It’s called Letsgohalf.

LetsGoHalf is a matchmaking platform for people who want to share a cost. Rent is the headline act, but the same logic stretches to splitting subscriptions and carpool rides; basically anything recurring and annoyingly expensive to carry alone.

Its tagline is: find your perfect match to split bills, and save up to 50%.

The mechanics will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever used a dating app. You sign up, you say what you’re after (budget, location, lifestyle, how strongly you’d prefer not to share a bathroom), and the matching engine pairs you with compatible people.

When it spots someone who’s a 90%+ fit, it emails you, and you can connect with them if you choose. Every user is verified thoroughly to avoid the risk of other users being catfished or scammed.

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LetsGoHalf went live in February 2026. A few months in, the picture looks like this:

• ~1,300 total users signed up

• ~300 have completed verification

• ~70 paid transactions so far

And almost all of that came from organic traffic, viral Instagram posts, zero ad spend. When people share your product for free, you’ve usually made something they actually want.

Instead of taking a cut of each transaction, LetsGoHalf charges for access.

• ₦10,000 gets you a monthly subscription

• ₦5,000 unlocks chat with a potential match

• ₦3,000 skips the chat and goes straight to a match’s contact details

The last tier is interesting because most products of this kind suffer from circumvention. Instead of trying to keep people from circumventing the app, they’re letting people just pay upfront for it anyway.

The tailwind here is enormous and unsubtle. Nigeria is young, rapidly urbanising, and in the grip of a cost-of-living squeeze that has turned “splitting costs” from a lifestyle preference into a survival strategy. Lagos rent inflation has made “I’ll just get my own place” a punchline. Every expensive, recurring bill is a potential use case, and there is no shortage of expensive, recurring bills.

But, and every honest memo has a but, LetsGoHalf is a marketplace, and marketplaces are hard in a specific, well-documented way: the cold start problem. You need people looking for roommates and a roughly equal pile of people on the other side, in the same place, at the same time. Right now demand outstrips supply; more people want a match than there are matches to go around. An app full of eager renters and not enough rooms is, ultimately, an app full of disappointed renters.

The second risk is leakage. The moment two people connect, nothing stops them from taking the conversation to WhatsApp and cutting the platform out of every future deal. That ₦3,000 “just give me the number” tier is a clever way to monetise the instinct rather than resist it, but it’s a patch, not a moat. The durable answer is to make the platform so useful, and so trusted, that staying on it beats leaving.

Next Capital’s take: We like the wedge. Rent-splitting in an unaffordable housing market is a real, sharp, painful problem, and “verified trust” is precisely the right thing to sell into it. The founder is technical, capital-efficient, and has already proven that people will share the product without being paid to.

What we’d want to see next is density over breadth. Pick one campus, one city, one corridor, and get liquidity so tight that a new user always finds a match, before chasing carpooling, subscriptions, and the full everything-splitter dream. The fastest route there probably runs through distribution partnerships: plug into the property-listing platforms where renters are already searching, so LetsGoHalf shows up at the exact moment someone realises they can’t afford the place alone. Solve the cold start in one dense pocket, and the playbook copies itself. Solve it nowhere, and you’ve got a beautiful app that occasionally works.

It’s early. The numbers are small. But the problem is the kind that doesn’t go away, and this team is pointed squarely at the right half of it.

We’ll be watching this one go halves.

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Until next week! 🫡

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