We make physical markets as measurable as the internet.
We gamify the mapping of emerging markets and sell the data to brands.
People play. Businesses see where to expand, what to stock and who to reach.
See how play becomes proofBuilt in the field. Designed to travel the world.
Where should we open next?
Is our product on the shelf?
What do people choose here?
Build a view of the places conventional maps miss.
Illustrative questions and evidence map · actual game screen
Billions of people shop where no company can see.
Online, every one of those purchases would be measured. Offline — where most of the world actually buys — they vanish.
- Meta
- Google Ads
- TikTok
- Amazon
The activity is there. The interpretation is missing.
- ~50 million
traditional stores — spaza shops, kiosks, stalls — across the emerging world.
MIT CTL / Tilburg, Reaching 50 Million Nanostores
- A missing trail
Offline cash purchases and local trade leave gaps in the digital record.
Premise, 2025
- 40–90%
of everyday goods in these markets still move through them.
Euromonitor
- $380bn
of sub-Saharan retail alone; informal output is more than half of regional GDP.
Euromonitor, 2021
- >$3bn
forecast annual spend on real-world data to ground physical-AI models.
Bessemer, 2026
How it works
Ask the market. Let people play. Decide with proof.
People play a game. The truth falls out. Questions become missions; useful observations become evidence a business can act on.
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“Where can you
find me?”
A buyer’s question Ask
Ask one question in Pikaboo. Define the place, the time and what would count as proof.
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The real game, on the street Play
People nearby play a mission, capturing what they can see with photos and context.
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From play to proof
- Place & time
- Photo & context
- Duplicate checks
Uncertain?
A person reviews it.Accepted evidence continues
Verify
Timbuk2 quality-checks place, time and proof, catches duplicates and sends uncertainty to human review.
- Back in Pikaboo
Know where.
Decide what’s next.- The question
- Where is the product available?
- The evidence
- Accepted observations, linked to their sources.
- The next move
- Plan a visit. Test a change. Check again.
Decide
Accepted evidence returns to Pikaboo. Choose the next move, then ask again to see what changed.
The next question starts with what you already know.
Illustrative buyer question; actual game screen. Every accepted signal strengthens the same governed evidence asset.
Fourteen years in the field
We helped retailers decide where to grow. Now we bring the market into view.
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Scouty
The store-location AI we built for the Shoprite Group, Africa’s largest grocery retailer.
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Primedia Outdoor
In live production: 23 campaigns in 45 days, across 10 account managers.
Running now -
National mapping mandate
A mandate to map South Africa’s informal retail economy at national scale.
Country scale -
Virgin Active
Site intelligence, including a proof of concept in France, 2024.
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UNIQ
Launched on our location intelligence.
- Shoprite Group
- Primedia Outdoor
- Takealot
- Pick n Pay
- Virgin Active
- WhereIsMyTransport
- African Union
- AWS
- Ninety One
- Endeavor SA
- Exxaro
- AWS-funded since 2024
- AWS Partner Network
- Evidence governance
- Fixed-scope SOW
- InfoSec summary
One engine. Two countries. A corpus that compounds.
Collection expanded from one instrument to four. The latest full week ran at 3.1× the prior four-week average.
recorded answers as of 16 September 2026
Across four collection instruments. Accepted evidence becomes part of a reusable, place-linked record.
Full week: 7–13 Sep 2026. Prior four weeks: 10 Aug–6 Sep. Recorded answers, not unique people.
- 3.1× latest full week vs prior four-week average
- 1 → 4 collection instruments
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The record said Formal datasets missed most of the informal businesses trading on the ground.
We found Games turn local knowledge, photos and choices into place-linked evidence for enterprise decisions.
- Four collection instruments
- Running in enterprise production
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The record said A new country, a new language, and no prior operating footprint.
We found An Abidjan billboard field test ran in under a day using the same collection engine.
- 219 records approved
- 76 unique billboards
- 77% within 50 m of the mapped position
From fieldwork to play at scale.
A survey records one visit. WhatsApp turns shelf photos into evidence. Games bring places, choices and local knowledge into the same engine.
More ways to play. More ways to learn.
Each new instrument opens another question the market can answer.
From local knowledge to an economic map of the world. Our ambition: millions of players. A richer record of physical markets.
A familiar mechanic. A new market.
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Pokémon GO
People will physically map the world for a game.
Hundreds of millions of players walked the planet and left a world-scale spatial asset behind them. The enduring value was never the interface. It was the map.
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Jana
You can pay people small rewards for data in emerging markets — and sell it to global FMCG.
About $100M raised, roughly 90 countries, 300+ mobile operators, supplying P&G, Unilever and Johnson & Johnson. The buyer and the mechanic, both proven.
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Niantic Spatial
The physical-AI buyer is already spending.
In May 2026 it appointed a crowd-capture supplier for real-world data to ground spatial models. The demand is not a forecast.
We bring game participation, field verification and enterprise decisions together in markets conventional data misses.
“We are building the ground-truth layer for Africa's informal economies. One day, we'll feed it into your model.”
Precedents, not partnerships. No agreement or endorsement is claimed.
The moat
The moat is not the players. It is what they leave behind.
The game is the engine. The corpus is the asset: a reusable economic data network that can answer the next market question.
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Owned at record level
Rights are held per record, so the same corpus answers the next question, and the one after that, without going back to the field.
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Built for reuse
The next decision can start with evidence already collected, then send a new question to the field where gaps remain.
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Coverage no one else holds
Places formal datasets never listed, refreshed by the people who are already standing there.
More collection instruments open more questions. Accepted evidence strengthens the same asset.
The world already moves. We turn that movement into intelligence.
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The phone captures it
Places, photos, voices and choices. The tools are already in people’s hands.
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The game brings people back
Local knowledge becomes play. Participation makes the market more visible.
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Built to cross continents
Operating work in South Africa and a field test in Abidjan. The ambition is one engine, delivered by people who know each market.
One million recorded signals. December 2026 target, not a result.
Bring us the market decision you need to defend.
One capture network, four ways the same verified evidence is bought — by media owners, by retail and FMCG, and increasingly at group and continental headquarters.
- Precision Marketing Plan, measure and prove out-of-home campaigns with independent, field-verified audience measurement. For media owners, agencies & advertisers
- Field Execution Know where to deploy field teams and prove what happened. For distribution, financial services & field-force leaders
- Retail Media & Activation Turn retail and township demand into verified, brand-funded sales. For brands, FMCG & retail media networks
- Audience Intelligence On-demand, ground-verified location and audience data for any geography. For brands, enterprises, public sector & researchers
A game became an intelligence asset.
timbuk2 began with a simple idea: the people closest to a market can reveal what conventional data cannot see. We turned that knowledge into play and paid participants for verified evidence about the world around them.
Pikaboo’s media product has been used in enterprise production. We’re now connecting the game’s field signals to repeatable enterprise decisions across markets.
The people behind Timbuk2.
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Leads Timbuk2’s direction, connecting the field network, evidence engine and enterprise decisions.
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Leads business operations, coordinating the people and processes that keep delivery moving.
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Leads the technical work behind Timbuk2’s products and evidence systems.
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Shapes the product experience, connecting questions, field participation and evidence people can use.
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Focuses on growth, helping more participants and customers discover and use Timbuk2.
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Connects leadership priorities with day-to-day execution across the team.
Board, advisors & legal
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The first deployment
Where should your teams move next, and what evidence will defend that decision?
One priority market, fixed fee. No retainer and no platform to adopt: a scoped, verifiable proof you can take to your executive committee.
- Scope Priority market
- Timeline Rapid mobilisation
- Commercials Fixed fee · fixed scope
- A field-verified market map
- A ranked deployment priority list
- Photo, GPS & timestamp evidence for every point
- Field notes captured on the ground
- A clean data spreadsheet you keep
- A recommended first move, argued from the evidence