Each month, our Young Entrepreneur Spotlight profiles dynamic leaders who are driving innovation and economic growth across Guyana. This series focuses on young, visionary founders who are not only building successful companies but also reshaping industries and creating new opportunities. This edition features Joshua Kissoon, CEO of Techlify, whose strategic leadership and innovative solutions have positioned his company at the forefront of Guyana’s digital transformation.

In this interview, we explore Joshua’s entrepreneurial journey, the operational and strategic challenges of scaling a tech company in Guyana, and Techlify’s role in shaping the country’s tech ecosystem in an environment of significant economic shifts caused by the oil and gas boom.

GEM: Joshua, to set the stage, could you briefly walk us through Techlify’s origins—when and why you founded the company, the market opportunity you identified, and the core products or services you offer today?

JK: During my time at the University of Guyana (UG), I started freelancing as a way to earn a bit of extra income to cover living expenses and built a few relationships. After UG, I worked for a year with a local tech company run by overseas-based Guyanese and realized they didn’t want to actually help develop Guyana, but rather just earn as much as they could. I left that job and went off for graduate studies, where I started a company in Bangalore with a friend, and realized the potential benefits to Guyana if I could build a similar business here. I came back to Guyana, and along with a colleague, Kyle Nakhul, started looking for freelance opportunities. I spent a few years in freelancing, starting to earn a living for myself, and my referrals really expanded the demand for my services. I ended up hiring an assistant, and in 2016, and around 2018, we started to introduce a formal business structure and growing the team. I spent the next few years learning about building a business and working to scale up to serve the customers in need of our services, while working towards a larger goal of contributing in a significant way to the development of Guyana.

GEM: Techlify was the first software company to earn the ‘Made in Guyana’ Standards Mark. Can you quantify how that certification has impacted your client acquisition, revenue growth, or ability to enter new markets?

JK: During our seven or so years of being in business, we’d have had a lot of challenges convincing customers to adopt technology, including:

1. Being accustomed to, and having trust in, their paper systems

2. Having a negative experience with other local companies and

3. Having negative experiences with foreign software products that local companies resell

Receiving the Made In Guyana Standards Mark helped massively with negative experiences with foreign software products, allowing us to convince customers that our product was made in Guyana, for Guyana. This is especially important for products that need to work with Guyana’s statutory documentation such as software for things like payroll, HR, auto dealerships, etc.

Surprisingly, this mark also helped us adress our clients negative experience with other local companies. With more companies trusting us and allowing us to work with them, the word spread. So, it has had quite the network effect.

GEM: Techlify offers a suite of software solutions, from HR management to accounting systems. How do these products uniquely address the operational challenges faced by businesses in Guyana, and what measurable improvements have your clients experienced as a result?

JK: As I mentioned above, some of our products are actually needed to work for Guyana, and it’s just better to have them built here. A lot of people have tried and failed to configure foreign products for Guyana, so this was a major benefit to our customers. Further, as Techlify grew from serving this unique need, we managed to establish a formal team in Guyana, and to have a formal company with a board of directors, a formal organizational structure, a customer support team, etc.

This structure has also allowed us to serve customers with products that don’t need to be unique to Guyana (accounting, inventory, etc.) because we can support them locally with onboarding, training, technical support, implementing custom features, etc.

This suite of products that we’ve built has now grown into its own ecosystem, which we’re now integrating to provide even more automation and benefits to our customers.

GEM: In a market where digital transformation is accelerating, how does Techlify ensure its products remain adaptable to diverse customer needs? Can you share examples where your technology has directly driven efficiency or growth for key clients?

JK: After we developed our products, we kept our entire engineering team. With this capacity, Techlify is constantly developing new modules and features into our product suite. Most of these new features are guided by feature requests from customers, which help them directly with their efficiency. This, in turn, keeps our product competitive and ahead of the competition in how we serve our customers. A few examples would be:

• BM Soat Auto Sales. They use our Smart Dealership software. We started working with them many moons ago, when they were fully paper-based, having rooms and rooms of paper. Now, this company has digitized more than 80% of its business, and we’re working to digitize the remainder. The company is able to serve around 3x the number of customers, with minimal increases in headcount of sales, operations, and finance staff, helping them to remain competitive in Guyana’s current labor market.

• Morgan’s Learning Center (MLC). Like BM Soat, we have worked with Sir. Morgan, since he started as a small lessons teacher. Sir. Morgan is a visionary on education, and we worked with him on the digital parts of that vision. Sir. Morgan has grown his lessons into a full school, serving more than 1,000 students yearly. We helped digitize MLC from the early days, and that system is still in use today, and is being upgraded to digitize more functions of the school.

• NSB Omega. NSB provides recruitment services to oil and gas companies. They use our payroll software to process payroll for their employees and automate processes, which used to take days, into just a few hours. Apart from the specifics of the companies above, most customers benefit from having a software system provide a business structure for the operations that the software system digitizes, which streamlines a host of operations.

GEM: Scaling a tech company in an emerging market often exposes operational bottlenecks. What were the top challenges Techlify faced in Guyana, and what strategic or organizational changes helped you overcome them?

JK: We’ve experienced a host of challenges along the way, the biggest one being the general mindset and culture of businesses in Guyana working with paper-based systems—mainly because this is what they’re accustomed to and trust. This was further exacerbated by the lack of staff education/experience on using software systems. Initially, we did a host of marketing campaigns to educate the market on the benefits of technology; then as our customer base expanded, business owners started sharing with each other, which led to a lot of referrals to Techlify.

The emergence of the oil & gas industry was a major driving force for tech adoption as well, since oil & gas companies require extensive reporting, and they forced their suppliers to adopt some type of technology.

To solve the issue of employees’ lack of technical knowledge, we developed extensive courses and training programs that included practical exercises so learners could get hands-on experience during training. Further, we built out training servers to allow learners a sandbox-type environment to experiment with our products, and built a training room at Techlify equipped with computers, projectors, etc., to facilitate a focused learning environment. Our training feedback rating is > 9.5/10 on average since we launched these sessions.

Some other challenges we’ve had to solve were:

• Lack of certain required technical skills locally—user experience designers, software QA engineers, etc.

• Companies are scared to use cloud-based systems because of blackouts and/or internet outages

• Guyana’s eGov agency is functioning like a private business and taking on digitization projects for government agencies rather than having open tenders

• Lack of trust in local technology businesses due to previous experiences with businesses being shut down after a few years, owners migrating, etc.

GEM: Access to capital is a key hurdle in emerging markets. Could you walk us through your fundraising approach, including investor types, deal structures, and any innovative financing methods you used to accelerate growth?

JK: Techlify started as a consultancy, which grew from my personal freelancing, so we were profitable from day one. In early 2020, we started taking those consultancy profits and investing in the development of our payroll product. We learned, however, that product development is insanely expensive, and we were going to need capital if we were to build out our product suite. Through various introductions and meetings via the ActionInvest community, we met an investor who bought into the company and invested enough capital over a few years for us to build our product suite. We’ve just about completed the launch of all the products in the suite—LMS is pending. Techlify is now at a point where consultancy accounts for less than a quarter of our income, and we are moving to being a 100% product-based company.

GEM: As a relatively young entrepreneur leading a pioneering tech firm, how has your generational perspective influenced Techlify’s approach to innovation, talent management, and market strategy?

JK: That’s a good one, I’ve never thought about this before. I think that my age allows me a unique advantage to build a tech company in Guyana. I’m 33, so I’m old enough to connect with the older folks using paper systems, but young enough to understand how technology integrates into the everyday life of younger generations and how Guyana will work in the future from a technology perspective. Given that Guyana is a very relationship-driven society, this allows me to connect well with business owners, old and young, as well as the younger generations who work in Tech, whom we need to build our company. It has also allowed me to connect with the older folks that we needed in Techlify to help manage and guide the company.

GEM: With Guyana’s oil and gas sector evolving rapidly, how has Techlify adapted its product offerings to meet this sector’s technological demands, and what competitive advantages position you well in this growing market?

JK: The oil & gas sector provided an amazing opportunity for Techlify, especially given the customizability of our product and the fact that we have a dedicated engineering team. We’ve managed to upgrade our payroll software to include many of the customizations and workflows needed by the oil & gas industry. In fact, based on the numbers released on oil & gas employment, Techlify likely processes over 70% of all oil & gas employee pay slips.

There are a few more complex workflows needed for some oil & gas companies, and we are currently engaged in expanding our products to cater for this.

Apart from directly serving the industry, the emergence of oil & gas provided a host of challenges in Guyana, such as a labor shortage, employment cost increases, and reporting requirements. These challenges are serving as a catalyst for the adoption of technology and automation across local industries, which is massively helping the adoption of our products.

GEM: Strategic partnerships can accelerate growth and open new markets. Could you share examples of collaborations—with local institutions, international partners,or government agencies—that have expanded Techlify’s capabilities? How do you measure their impact?

JK: We’ve not had any deliberate strategic partnerships. However, it is something that we are exploring at the moment with a host of companies we align with. That being said, we’ve benefited from working with several groups, including:

• ActionInvest Caribbean Inc., where Dr. Doerga provided coaching for me personally, and his team provided a host of training and guidance for our team. We met many of our customers at their networking events.

• The American Chamber & GMSA have both been invaluable resources for us to access business networks in Guyana, and they have always been willing to help Techlify in any way they can. In fact, if I can give a shoutout to GMSA, technology was not a category available on the “Made in Guyana” certification just a short while ago, and after some failed attempts, GMSA provided needed assistance for us to convince GNBS to have this adjustment made.

GEM: Looking forward, which emerging technologies or market trends do you see as critical to Techlify’s next phase, and how are you positioning the company to capitalize on these opportunities?

JK: For Techlify, we think we’ve found our niche in the mid-sized business market. We’re currently focused on integration of our product suite, so things can be automated as much as possible for our customers. Our aim over the next 3-5 years is to make this as amazing as we can for our customers. Our goal remains simple: simplify life by saving time, energy, and money.

I know you’d expect me to say AI somewhere in here, but we’re not going to be building out any AI on our own, plenty of companies are working on this. Whenever AI that integrates with software products becomes mature enough that it’s not a burden (as it is in our experience with most of the AI software integration happening at the moment), we will be integrating one of those into our software suite. We’re hoping this happens by early 2026.

GEM: Thank you, Joshua, for sharing your insights. We look forward to showcasing how Techlify is shaping Guyana’s digital future.