Snapshot
- Company: UNITED BRANDS (U) LIMITED, Uganda: four operating businesses under one founder, Ssebandeke Dullaart.
- Use case: Orventa Payments, an in-house payment orchestration platform (mobile money, cards, QR, per-business attribution) that grew into a full ERP.
- Before: a separate payment-provider integration per business, with middleman fees near 3.5% on every transaction.
- After: one platform he owns processes payments for every business in real time.
- Key metric: four businesses running on Bolt.new, front end and back end, and a workday that used to run 5 a.m. to midnight, now down to 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
First movement: four businesses, one founder
Ssebandeke Dullaart runs four businesses in Uganda under one company, UNITED BRANDS (U) LIMITED: a grooming and beauty lounge, an e-commerce store, an online food-ordering service, and the payment platform that moves money for all of them. All four businesses run on the AI app builder, Bolt.new, from the front ends to the infrastructure underneath them.
"My businesses are my dreams," he said.
He holds a BSc in Information Technology, but he'll tell you he's a businessman first: the kind who is always brewing a new idea and never wastes a shilling.
Second movement: building the rails
Every business needs to take money, and in Uganda that starts with mobile money. The wallet lives on the customer's SIM card, and they pay by phone. His first plan was the obvious one: integrate an existing payment provider into each business. Then he ran the numbers. The telco opens its rails to a processor at roughly 1.5%. The processor turns around and charges the merchant about 3.5%. Spread that margin across four businesses, every sale, and every booking deposit, and the obvious plan looked like a permanent tax on everything he'd built.
"I don't want to have a middleman... I become my own everything."
The answer arrived at night, in plan mode.
"Sometimes I chat with Bolt when I have ideas. I put it in plan mode and discuss my vision regarding money handling for my businesses. Bolt summed up my idea and suggested a payment orchestration system."
After investigating existing options, Ssebandeke decided against renting one. He'd build it: one system that collects payments for every United Brands business, knows which business each transaction belongs to, and reports it all in real time.
"My aha moment came when complex systems that would normally require weeks of engineering started working within hours."
Orventa Payments handles mobile money through the telco's own open APIs. He registered, passed anti-money-laundering onboarding, and let his platform ride rails the telco already secures. Cards run through a certified aggregator for now, because PCI certification is an investment he's deferring until the volume justifies it. The economics show up at checkout, where mobile money costs his customers nothing and cards carry a 3.5% surcharge.
Around that core he kept building: merchant dashboards, QR payment flows, payment links, and the booking deposits that ended the no-show problem at the beauty lounge. He scoped Bolt.new's context to Uganda, so every proposed solution fits his market.
"The realization was that Bolt wasn't just helping build pages: it was helping build an entire business platform."
Third movement: the ERP crescendo
The payment platform grew into a full ERP. He built agents into his processes too. Now payroll, accounting, purchasing, inventory, booking, and AI front-desk assistants all run through his orchestration system.
Staff clock in by scanning a QR code that only works on the business Wi-Fi, and the timesheet flows straight into payroll. A sick-leave claim has to include medical records, which the system checks against a database of local hospitals and red-flags for his review. As new challenges come up, Ssebandeke tries to hire an agent or build a workflow first, but he scopes the type of work he offloads to AI.
"Agents, they are my assistants. They don't decide for me."
One action stays his alone: approving refunds.
Fourth movement: taking it on tour
The results read like a balance sheet. Four businesses on infrastructure he owns. Payments from all of them settling through one real-time dashboard with per-business attribution. A workday that used to run 5 a.m. to midnight now runs 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Ssebandeke wants to perfect Orventa Payments and its orchestration system within his own businesses first.
"If I make mistakes, I make them with my own businesses, not with people."
His four operations give him a beta testing ground big enough to get the product ready for the next phase: other customers.
That evolution is coming. He's planning to extend his payment system's reach, first to local businesses in Uganda, then across East Africa, where cross-border payments still run on manual workarounds.
He benchmarks against Stripe without blinking. Nothing in the system is hard-coded, so the whole stack can white-label the day a buyer shows up.
"Someday, I'll be like Stripe. I'm only starting with Uganda."
