In a small office in Dar es Salaam, a single founder is doing two things that don't usually share a résumé. By day he's shipping code for WebYetu, the website and online-store builder steadily growing into one of the most-used digital tools for small businesses across East Africa. By night, he's animating characters in Blender — work that took home Best Commercial at the 2025 Tanzanite International Animation Festival.
Meet Innocent Manda: software engineer, 3D artist, and one of the rare African builders who treats engineering and storytelling as halves of the same craft.
A different kind of African founder
Most Tanzanian tech founders we've met fall into one of two camps — the engineer who wishes someone would handle the brand, or the designer who wishes someone would handle the code. Manda is, unusually, both.
Born December 22, 2000 in Dar es Salaam, he grew up between math books and animation tutorials. He started coding seriously in his late teens, around the same time he discovered Blender. By 2024 he was publicly shipping product — WebYetu's first version went live, and his 3D work was being submitted to festivals.
"I never separated the two. Writing software and modelling characters use the same muscle: thinking in systems, then making the system feel like nothing at all."
WebYetu: a website builder for how Africa actually does business
WebYetu's pitch is simple and unsexy in the way that working products usually are. It's a website builder, online store, and link-in-bio tool — but built around the realities of how small businesses in Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and across the continent actually operate.
That means mobile-first editors a shop owner can use from their phone. It means M-Pesa, Airtel Money, and Mixx integrations as default, not bolt-ons. It means free subdomains so businesses can publish without buying a domain first. It means a no-code editor that, in Manda's words, "doesn't pretend to be Webflow for the kind of customer Webflow was never built for."
The platform has steadily added blogs, e-commerce, custom domains, tip jars, and even a Linktree-style "My Links" feature — all polished and shipped solo. Looking at the public changelog, it's hard to tell that one person is writing the code, designing the interfaces, and doing the marketing 3D for the platform itself.
Winning Tanzanite
The 3D career runs in parallel and won serious recognition in 2025. At the Tanzanite International Animation Festival, Manda took home Best Commercial — a category that rewards animation that does more than just look good: it has to sell, persuade, or move a story along.
Coming from a continent whose animation industry is still finding its voice, the recognition put a name on the kind of Tanzanian visual storytelling that travels.
"I think the next decade of African animation is going to be incredible. We've got the stories. We're catching up on the tools. We just need more people who treat both seriously."
What's next
Manda is the kind of operator who is unusually quiet for a founder. No personal hype, no founder-bro Twitter threads. The work shows up; the work speaks. WebYetu keeps adding features. Animation projects keep getting better.
Asked what's next, he gives a typically short answer: more shipping. Bigger platform features, more polished animation, and — eventually — bringing the two worlds together more visibly.
Africa builds quietly, sometimes. Manda is one to keep watching.
About: Innocent Manda is a Tanzanian software engineer, 3D artist, and founder of WebYetu. Read more on his profile page or follow his work on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and GitHub.