Launching Edge

In September of 2024, Tregter started a pro-bono initiative with The Do More Foundation to help improve their data management for ECD (Early Childhood Development) research. At the time, they were using a WhatsApp Business Account to collect submissions from various sites across South Africa, and then manually transferring it to Excel for cleaning. Their primary challenges were tracking outstanding data and managing the poor quality of submitted data. We stepped in to help automate the process.

What initially started as a WhatsApp bot quickly turned into a fully featured dynamic form-builder platform. Along the way, the project even placed a podium position at the BRICS Youth Innovation Summit. As for Do More, they have seen massive uptake in data submissions, improvement in data quality, and have essentially stamped out all fraudulent submissions. As a result, they have been able to scale up their research efforts and freed up time to focus on the work that matters.

18 months down the line it has become quite obvious that we’re sitting on a product that could be useful to many businesses, and because of this, we’ve decided to release Edge as a commercial product. This also marks an exciting milestone for our business. Ever since we started consulting in software and data engineering in 2022, the goal has been to find a key industry pain point, and deliver a product that alleviates it. As my business partner said - Edge has found the best product-market fit we have ever seen. The value is instantly obvious.

In this post I’ll briefly discuss

• what Edge is
• who it could be useful to
• the launch plan
• plans for further enhancements

What is Edge?

Edge is a tool that allows your business to collect data using WhatsApp.

It is, however, not a chat bot. WhatsApp released a feature in 2023 called WhatsApp Flows, which allows businesses to embed data-capture forms straight into a WhatsApp chat - making it much closer to a native app experience than a chat interface. As of 2026, it is the most underutilised WhatsApp feature. In fact, every time I show someone what a Flow looks like, their reaction is pleasant surprise. I’ve never met anyone that has seen them before. We can fix that. Just scan the QR code below with your phone’s camera, and hit send on WhatsApp (if you are reading this on your phone, just click this link). You will receive a message prompting you to fill out a form, click the button to see the magic.

If you played along and filled out the form, your data is now captured on our system, and can be viewed in our submissions explorer. Here you can use filters to scan through data before downloading as Excel or CSV.

You would’ve noticed that the form structure didn’t leave many gaps for data-entry mistakes. After years of working in data engineering, we can say first-hand that all businesses struggle to keep their data clean - even internationally listed entities are fumbling with Excel spreadsheets that contain messy data. The lowest hanging fruit for scaling your business is creating visibility to improve decision making, and visibility at the edges can be improved by simplifying data collection for non-technical users in messy environments. Edge makes it easy for staff and clients alike to partake in creating that visibility for your business.

Who would benefit from Edge?

The goal for Edge is to simplify collecting data at the…Edge. The platform was hardened in rural South Africa over the last 18 months. What we’ve seen so far is that:

• everyone has WhatsApp
• everyone understands WhatsApp Flows

Since Edge is a general purpose data collection platform, we don’t prescribe how you should use the tool. Think of it like an extension to Excel, or a WhatsApp version of Google Forms. That being said, we believe that these use cases are the obvious targets:

• customer feedback (store front QR or follow-up broadcast)
• field data collection (think agri, construction, or maintenance)
• operational visibility (daily proof of work submissions)
• logistics (proof of delivery, tracking odometer readings)
• community driven MERL (Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning)
• market research

We will be diving into each use case in more detail in the coming weeks. But for now, we are curious how your business could benefit from this platform. Please reach out to talk! Or just scan the QR code above and fill out the form.

How will the launch work?

The platform is live, and has been for a long time now. For the time being, we will control access (meaning you just need to contact us to get started). We plan to open it up for self-onboarding once we have improved documentation. We are actively working on this.

What are your plans going forward?

While the platform is already useful, we are not catering well to customers at the two extremes yet.

Enterprise customers will require advanced integrations back to their in-house systems (SAP, DataBricks, etc.), security guarantees & compliance, and SSO integration. We have a massive backlog of features to get to before we could be classified as an enterprise-ready tool. We are, however, actively looking for enterprise customers to start onboarding, as this will speed up development and help guide the process.

Small Businesses are coming in at a price point that will be hard to sustain at the moment (from a support perspective). While we are onboarding businesses in the Starter pricing tier, we will be doing this at a controlled rate so that we have time to improve automation and documentation.

Going forward, our plan is to keep developing until the platform caters to a wider audience. It takes months to turn a platform into a product. The Edge platform is stable. In order to turn it into a product, we need to see how customers engage and then rapidly adapt to their needs.

Wrapping Up

This was a brief overview of the platform that we’ve developed. I chose to not go into too much detail about features, but I will be covering them in the coming weeks. The takeaway for me was that we developed this platform to solve a real problem, and out of that came a real product.

The roots of Edge was as a pro-bono tool for NPOs. We couldn’t have developed this product without Do More constantly spamming us with bug discoveries (yes, I’m talking about you Thea). Because of that, Edge will always remain 100% free for NPOs working on social impact. Data is the key to scaling business, but it is also the key to building a better future for South Africa. Visibility of impact drives private investment, our hope is that Edge makes it easier for NPOs to source funds from corporates, and also helps them to measure and improve impact. Tregter will always remain loyal to the cause of using Data for Social Impact.

FAQ

• How do I get access to Edge? Set up a meeting or message me on LinkedIn.
• Can I brand Edge? Yes, you have to add your own WhatsApp Business Account to use Edge. You can brand it however you want.
• How does the pricing work? Edge is priced at a fixed cost. WhatsApp is priced on top of Edge. When users request a form (eg. via a QR code) the WhatsApp message is free, when you broadcast a form directly to the user WhatsApp bills per message. We will cover this in more detail soon.