Vabu
Infrastructure for experiences that last. A platform for creators, organisers, and fanbases to build events, streams, and communities — spun out of Payd Experiences and now a standalone venture serving Africa's live economy.
Why it exists
Africa has a live economy — events, concerts, gatherings, communities — that runs on WhatsApp group chats, cash at the door, and hand-written guest lists. The infrastructure that supports Eventbrite, Patreon, and Substack in other markets does not exist for the continent's creators, organisers, and communities. The few platforms that do exist were built elsewhere and adapted inattentively.
Vabu exists because the creators building the continent's live economy deserve infrastructure that was built for them, not ported to them.
Where it sits
Vabu is a proof point for something Labs believes deeply: the best new ventures come out of operating companies that discover adjacent problems their existing infrastructure can solve. Vabu began life as Payd Experiences — a way for Payd to route payments for event tickets and creator subscriptions. The product-market fit signal was so strong, and the scope so different from Payd's core money OS, that spinning it out as a separate company was the only honest move.
Vabu now operates independently with its own team, its own distribution, and its own roadmap. Payd remains a payment partner. The relationship compounds without the distraction of forced synergy.
What compounds
Every event on Vabu brings its own audience, which discovers new events, which find new organisers, which bring new audiences. The flywheel is classic marketplace economics — but the vertical specialism (African live economy, creator-led, mobile-first, multi-currency) is what makes it hard for a generic Eventbrite-clone to unseat.
The deeper compound is data. Every event adds signal to the platform's understanding of who shows up for what, at what price, in which city. That signal is not a data moat in the extractive sense; it is an infrastructure moat in the useful one. Organisers who use Vabu do better the more the platform knows.