Nigerian-Founded Minicor Raises $3.8 Million for AI Integration Platform

What changed

Minicor, an AI startup co-founded by Nigerian software engineer Saheed Akinbile and Faizaan Chishtie, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding.

IA Ventures led the round, with participation from Y Combinator, Paul Graham, Pioneer Fund, Robinhood Ventures, Garage Capital, Rebel Fund, K5 Global and 20VC. Minicor’s platform connects AI applications to older desktop software through automated workflows running on Windows machines and virtual environments such as Citrix.

Why it matters

The obstacle Minicor is tackling is familiar inside many businesses: the software that holds critical data often has no modern API. Replacing it is expensive. Building a custom integration from scratch is slow. Minicor’s approach is to let developers describe a workflow, turn it into an API endpoint, and have the system carry out the underlying actions through desktop automation.

That makes the company less a provider of another AI feature than a proposed plumbing layer for enterprise AI. Its pitch is simple: businesses can add new AI tools without first ripping out the software already running their operations.

Minicor says it was processing thousands of workflows each week across healthcare electronic health records and other legacy systems. It also says one customer went from proof of concept to live deployment in three weeks. Those figures suggest the product is aimed at getting past the demo stage, although the company has not disclosed its revenue, reliability or customer concentration.

The harder test now is consistency. Desktop automation can connect systems that were never designed to work together, but Minicor will need those workflows to keep working as usage grows and software environments differ. The new funding gives it room to develop that infrastructure and serve more businesses, but the company has not said how it will spend the money.