Naspers has a new kind of product, and for now it is free. Through its international arm Prosus, the JSE's largest technology group has launched ToqanClaw, a tool that lets business owners build their own apps, dashboards and automations simply by describing what they want, with no coding required.
What ToqanClaw does
The pitch is that anyone can create working software the way they would explain a task to a colleague. Prosus says it is the first company in Europe, and one of only a handful worldwide, to offer this at scale to its partners: more than five million restaurants, merchants and entrepreneurs. It is aimed first at restaurants, and Prosus points to early results such as a Dutch café chain that cut financial reporting from weeks to 30 minutes and a Rotterdam burger chain saving €21,000 a month. Chief executive Fabricio Bloisi says the group already runs 60,000 AI agents and 10,000 applications internally, built by people who never wrote a line of code. Prosus has also trained a specialised commerce model on data from more than a billion customers and 500 million daily interactions to plug into the tool.
The catch: no clear way to make money
For now, ToqanClaw is free, both for companies inside the Prosus stable and those outside it. And that is the problem: the group is still working out how, or even whether, it will make money from the platform. Prosus's strategy chief, Laura Fitoussi, says a paid version is not ruled out, but the priority right now is simply getting businesses to use it. To keep costs down, she says the tool is "model agnostic", automatically picking the cheapest capable model for each request and leaning on cheaper open-source models where it can.
Investors want proof
That has made some investors nervous. Analysts who once backed Naspers' AI push have turned cautious; as one fund manager put it, the market is now in "show-me-the-money mode". For Naspers, ToqanClaw is a bet that owning the tools millions of small businesses lean on every day will pay off eventually, even if the money isn't flowing yet. Whether investors keep their patience is the next test.
