Tathmini is building investment research for African markets

A company announces higher profits. Its share price moves. For an investor deciding what to do next, the announcement raises further questions. What drove the growth? Is it likely to continue? What risks sit behind the headline? And how much of that improvement is already reflected in the price?

We’re building Tathmini to help investors work through those questions.

Tathmini Research is an AI-powered research desk for African public markets, and the team behind the Tathmini app, now in development. Our initial focus is the Nairobi Securities Exchange. Our aim is to make rigorous research easier for individual investors to access, understand and examine, from the economics of a business to the assumptions behind its valuation.

Connecting the business to the investment case

Understanding a company involves bringing together its financial statements, management commentary, industry conditions and the price investors are being asked to pay. The useful conclusion comes from understanding how those pieces fit together.

Consider a bank reporting higher profits. An investor might want to know whether it earned more from lending, benefited from lower funding costs or set aside less money for potential loan losses. Those explanations have different implications for the durability of its earnings.

The research experience we are designing starts with a clear assessment of a company and the main reasons behind it. From there, readers should be able to explore its performance, financial position, valuation and risks.

That means helping investors answer practical questions: how does this business make money, what could support its future earnings, what expectations does its valuation depend on, and what could undermine the case for owning it?

Making the evidence visible

Trustworthy research needs an explanation that readers can examine.

Our approach starts with source material: company disclosures, financial statements, regulatory publications and other relevant evidence. We connect material conclusions to the documents, calculations and assumptions that support them, and every claim in our reports is footnoted to its source.

A reader should be able to distinguish between a figure a company reported, a measure we calculated and an estimate about the future. Reporting periods and later revisions also matter. A full-year result and a half-year result need to be identified clearly before they can be compared meaningfully.

The same principle applies to valuation. Readers should be able to see the assumptions about growth, profitability and risk, and understand how different assumptions affect the result.

Where information is incomplete or sources conflict, that uncertainty should remain visible. Readers should have enough context to assess the strength of the evidence and decide whether they agree with our interpretation.

Using AI to support careful research

We use AI to assist the work behind an investment assessment: locating relevant disclosures, extracting and organising information, comparing reporting periods, flagging inconsistencies, running the analysis and helping draft and explain complex material.

This makes it practical to investigate more questions and, over time, to maintain research as new information arrives. It also creates a responsibility to check the work carefully.

Financial calculations and valuations need defined methods and reproducible results. Our design puts those calculations in structured models and software, with AI helping investigate and explain the surrounding evidence. Generated analysis is checked against the source material and underlying calculations.

The benefit we are working towards is research that gives investors a clearer understanding of a business, with evidence and reasoning they can inspect.

Following an investment as the evidence changes

An investment case develops over time. New results can strengthen it. Rising borrowing costs can weaken it. A change in the share price can alter the potential return even when the underlying business is performing as expected.

Tathmini aims to make those developments easier to follow.

We want readers to see what has changed since an earlier assessment, why it matters, and whether it affects the valuation, the risks or the original reasoning. Preserving earlier conclusions alongside revisions would make that history open to examination.

Each investment case should also identify the developments that would cause us to reconsider it. If an assessment depends on improving margins or stable loan quality, readers should know that and be able to follow the relevant evidence.

Scenarios are part of this approach. Exploring different paths for a business can show which assumptions matter most and where a conclusion is particularly sensitive to uncertainty.

Helping investors understand the wider market

Company research becomes more useful when readers understand the industry around it.

Our first reports, Powering Kenya and Kenya’s Real Estate, reflect that approach. Understanding a power company begins with how electricity is generated, delivered and paid for. Assessing a property investment involves understanding rents, occupancy, financing and the ability of tenants to pay.

We want to connect those foundations to the securities investors can consider, including listed companies and real estate investment trusts.

For individual investors, this means research that explains unfamiliar terms, uses clear charts and examples, and makes the reasoning behind a conclusion easy to follow. Readers should be able to begin with an accessible overview and move into the supporting analysis when they want greater depth.

Over time, we hope this helps people build the knowledge to evaluate new opportunities for themselves.

Starting with Kenya

Kenya is our starting point. Our broader ambition is to apply this approach across African public markets, building coverage around the institutions, industries and reporting practices of each market.

As we develop Tathmini, we are publishing research and insights that demonstrate the approach: explaining how markets work, examining businesses in detail and making the assumptions behind our conclusions visible.

Our goal is to help investors make decisions they understand and can revisit as the evidence changes. They should be able to explain why an investment interests them, what risks they are accepting and what would make them reconsider.