As the artificial intelligence industry becomes increasingly dominated by billion-dollar valuations, massive research laboratories, and aggressive funding wars, a Nigerian startup with no external backing has pushed itself into one of the most competitive conversations in global tech.
Decide, an AI data analytics platform founded by former Flutterwave developer Abiodun Adetona, has been ranked among the world’s leading AI agents for spreadsheet-related tasks after securing fourth place on SpreadsheetBench, an internationally recognised benchmark used to evaluate AI performance on practical spreadsheet operations.
The result has placed the Nigerian company alongside some of the most heavily financed AI players operating today.
Only three systems ranked ahead of Decide: Nobie Agent, Shortcut.ai, and Qingqiu Agent. The scale separating these companies from the Nigerian startup tells its own story. Shortcut.ai was developed by Fundamental Research Labs, a company that reportedly raised around $30 million in funding, while Qingqiu Agent operates with more than 5,000 employees and carries an estimated market valuation of nearly $5 billion.
Decide, by comparison, was built by a three-person team without outside investment. The startup recorded an 82.5% accuracy score on SpreadsheetBench after successfully completing 330 out of 400 verified spreadsheet tasks. The benchmark measures how effectively AI systems handle real spreadsheet workflows, including formula generation, messy data cleanup, multi-sheet reasoning, and complex Excel operations commonly encountered in workplaces.
Unlike many AI evaluations built around simplified demonstrations, SpreadsheetBench was designed using actual spreadsheet problems sourced from online forums where users seek solutions to difficult Excel-related challenges. The benchmark was developed by researchers from Tsinghua University and Renmin University of China before being introduced at NeurIPS 2024, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence conferences.
Its “Verified” category, the section used to evaluate Decide, contains 400 carefully selected tasks intended to ensure fair comparisons between competing AI agents.
For Adetona, the motivation behind Decide came from a problem many professionals understand too well: the enormous amount of time lost cleaning spreadsheets, correcting formulas, organising scattered data, and navigating complicated workflows manually.
Rather than functioning as a passive assistant that simply generates suggestions, Decide was designed to understand spreadsheet structures, execute tasks directly, and explain its actions in clear human language.
The product’s growth has gathered momentum since its launch. In less than a month after becoming publicly accessible, the startup had already drawn over 1,000 users. Today, the platform is approaching 5,000 users, with a growing number of paying customers on board.
For years, African startups have largely been viewed through the lens of limitation, limited funding, limited infrastructure, limited access to advanced computing power. Yet across fintech, digital payments, logistics, media, and now artificial intelligence, Nigerian founders continue building products capable of competing far beyond local markets.
Decide’s emergence arrives at a time when conversations around AI are becoming increasingly concentrated around a handful of global powers. The assumption has often been that meaningful breakthroughs can only come from companies backed by enormous capital reserves and vast engineering teams but this latest ranking challenges that narrative.
It also reflects a defining characteristic of many African technology products: solving practical problems before chasing spectacle. Across the continent, AI startups are increasingly focused on business efficiency, operational support, automation, and tools that address immediate realities faced by organisations and professionals.
In that environment, spreadsheet automation may appear ordinary on the surface but in practice, however, spreadsheets remain central to finance, administration, logistics, research, and decision-making across thousands of businesses worldwide.
The larger question now is whether African AI startups can sustain global competitiveness as the industry becomes more expensive and resource-intensive. Building advanced AI systems requires enormous computing infrastructure, highly specialised talent, and long-term financing, areas where many African founders still face major disadvantages.
Yet Decide’s rise underscores once again that innovation does not always emerge from the largest offices, the loudest announcements, or the deepest investor pockets.
Sometimes, it comes from builders who understand the problem well enough to create something the world cannot ignore.
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