" Across rural Africa, informal savings groups are where real financial life happens — neighbours pooling money, lending to each other, showing up week after week. Yet because none of it is recorded, the formal system treats these communities as risky and unprofitable. By digitizing that behaviour, we turn trust into data and data into access — building a financial system that finally works from the bottom up. " – Shema Steve, CEO & Founder
Exuus is a Rwanda-based lending-as-a-service company building AI credit infrastructure for savings groups — turning savings behaviour into financial identity. Its flagship product, the SAVE App, digitizes savings-group ledgers and transactions via smartphone and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD,) while SAVE Score, its behaviour-based scoring engine, embeds into banks and mobile money platforms to enable fair, data-driven lending to people without formal credit histories. Exuus is actively developing SAVE Bot, a generative AI chatbot, and a voice AI interface for feature-phone users, bringing conversational financial services to populations excluded from digital banking. Founded in 2014 and fully focused on the SAVE App since 2020, Exuus serves 260,000+ users across 15,000+ savings groups in Rwanda — roughly 70% women — via 3,300+ agents, processing over $10M. It validates on-lending at scale with GT Bank Rwanda; partners include Global System for Mobile Association (GSMA), LuxDev, Heifer International Rwanda, Access to Finance Rwanda (AFR), develoPPP Ventures, and Google for Startups, among others. In 2026, Exuus intends to expand into Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, targeting 2 million users by 2027, using the AI Hub's compute to enhance SAVE Score, deploy SAVE Bot on AWS, and develop its voice AI interface.
