Nigeria’s event-planning industry is getting a new digital tool as Ahavaplan, a startup founded by Christine Imoukhuede, seeks to replace the fragmented systems many planners use to manage their businesses.
The platform brings client management, proposals, budgets, invoicing, payments and event coordination into one place, while an artificial intelligence assistant called Ella helps automate several time-consuming tasks.
The startup’s shift from the United States to Nigeria followed Imoukhuede’s observation that American planners already had access to numerous digital tools, while Nigerian planners largely depended on WhatsApp and Excel.
“Most Nigerian planners today manage everything through WhatsApp and Excel,” she said.
The founder further noted that this often causes enquiries to disappear, payments to be missed and planners to struggle with managing multiple events efficiently.
What to know about Ahavaplan
Ahavaplan is essentially a digital business-management platform designed specifically for event planners.
Rather than requiring planners to move between WhatsApp, spreadsheets, notebooks and separate invoicing tools, the platform provides a central system for managing their day-to-day operations.
It gives planners a permanent link through which clients can reach them, a pipeline for following enquiries from initial contact through booking, and invoicing and payment-tracking features that clients can also access.
The platform also provides a client portal where proposals can be reviewed and work can be approved. According to Imoukhuede, the idea emerged from her extensive experience in event planning, having personally planned more than 30 events.
She began building Ahavaplan in 2021 while working at Apple before leaving her job in 2023 to pursue the startup full-time.
Ella: AI assistant for event planners
A major feature distinguishing Ahavaplan from a conventional event-management platform is its artificial intelligence assistant, Ella.
The AI tool is designed to reduce the administrative burden placed on planners by helping them prepare materials and monitor events. Ella can write client proposals, develop event budgets in Naira, create timelines and generate task lists for planners.
It can also alert a planner when an event appears to be falling behind schedule, potentially allowing problems to be identified before they become serious.
“We also built an AI assistant called Ella,” Imoukhuede said, explaining that the system was designed around practical tasks planners routinely perform.
In effect, Ahavaplan is seeking to make AI a working assistant rather than simply an add-on, enabling planners to spend less time on repetitive administration and more time delivering events.
From a US wedding marketplace to a Nigeria-first startup
Ahavaplan’s current Nigerian focus represents a significant change from its original business model.
In July 2023, the company launched its first product in the United States as a mobile wedding-planning marketplace. Over two years, the product attracted more than 650 planners and 80 events.
However, Imoukhuede eventually concluded that the American market already offered event professionals many digital tools, while Nigerian planners faced a much larger technology gap.
In 2025, the company therefore closed its US product, returned to Nigeria and rebuilt Ahavaplan as subscription-based software for local planners.
“We changed direction, because American planners already had plenty of tools while planners back home had nothing built for them,” Imoukhuede said.
The strategic shift effectively transformed Ahavaplan from a US wedding marketplace into a Nigerian-focused business-management platform.
Early traction points to growing demand in Nigeria
The startup says its Nigerian launch has generated encouraging early interest, with adoption reportedly moving faster than during its American phase.
Within its first eight weeks, 160 planners had started free trials, most coming from a database of about 700 planners developed before launch. Imoukhuede said this represented approximately three times the monthly pace achieved by the American product.
However, the distinction between free trials and paying customers remains important because the company was still at an early commercial stage, with its first three paying customers subscribed to the Pro plan.
Ahavaplan was also conducting between five and 10 product demonstrations every week as it sought to convert more trial users into subscribers.
Its wider community of more than 2,500 planners and content reach of over 3.5 million people could also help the startup reduce the cost of acquiring customers.
Nigeria first, with wider African expansion in sight
For now, Ahavaplan is deliberately concentrating its operations within Nigeria, beginning with major urban centres such as Lagos, Abuja and Enugu before expanding to other locations.
The company’s strategy is to build a strong domestic foundation before entering other African markets.
Over the next year, it plans to introduce a vendor directory featuring discounts negotiated for its planners, while also developing a community designed to encourage collaboration across the event-planning industry.
The startup subsequently intends to move into venue onboarding and booking before entering Ghana as its second market. Kenya and other African countries are expected to follow under its five-year expansion plan.
As Imoukhuede puts it, the company sees itself as “Nigeria-first and Africa-bound,” signalling an ambition to build technology around the realities of African event businesses and eventually scale that solution across the continent.
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