If Personal safety has become part of everyday decision-making for millions of Nigerians, from sharing live locations with relatives to calling family members during late-night journeys. Yet much of that safety system still depends on informal communication, leaving families with limited information when something goes wrong.
- Virgua is a Nigerian personal safety technology company aiming to formalise informal safety practices like live-location sharing and emergency alerts.
- Virgua will first launch in Nigeria, but faces challenges like user adoption and infrastructure reliability, with hopes to eventually expand across African markets facing similar security gaps.
- Founded by Franklyn Eluagu after a personal family emergency, Virgua turns smartphones into ‘virtual guardians’ using AI, community feeds, and automated check-ins.
- Nigeria’s growing concerns over crime and insecurity create a pressing need, with 61% feeling unsafe in their neighborhoods and most describing the country as unsafe.
Building a safety company around trust
Eluagu’s route into technology differs from that of many African start-up founders.
He has spent more than a decade in communications, marketing and brand building rather than software engineering.
His career began with work supporting digital communications for the Executive Governor of Imo State.
He later handled digital marketing strategy for a luxury retail portfolio that included Puma, Lacoste and Hugo Boss.
At EbonyLife, under media entrepreneur Mo Abudu, he led social media work across its films, studios and Creative Academy.
His work included projects involving Netflix productions such as Blood Sisters and Castle & Castle, as well as Sony Pictures Television’s pan-African Alo Writers initiative.
Eluagu currently leads communications for four beverage brands at Planet Bottling Company while building Virgua alongside its design and development teams.
He argues that his communications background addresses one of the most difficult commercial challenges facing personal safety technology: convincing users to trust a company with highly sensitive information.
“For more than a decade, my entire job has been getting people to trust things they have not seen yet, whether it is a show that has not aired, a brand nobody has heard of, or a message from someone they have never met,” he said.
“So when people ask why a marketing person is building a safety company, I tell them that trust is the real product here, and the app is only the delivery mechanism.”
For Virgua, earning that trust could prove as important as the technology itself. Users must be willing to share their location, while families must believe the platform will work when an emergency occurs.
“Think about what you are asking for,” Eluagu said. “You are asking someone to hand over their live location, and you are asking a mother to believe that if her child’s phone goes quiet, this app will tell her the truth rather than a false alarm or silence, and that it will work in the one moment it has to rather than in a polished demo.”
“That is an enormous amount of trust to ask of a stranger, and no amount of clever engineering earns it on its own. You earn it the way a brand earns loyalty, by never once giving people a reason to doubt you.”
Africa’s personal safety gap creates a technology opportunity
Virgua is entering a market shaped by a wider African safety challenge, with women facing some of the sharpest concerns.
Globally, 67% of women say they feel safe walking alone at night, compared with 78% of men.
In Africa, the gap is wider, with just over a quarter of women in South Africa feeling safe walking alone at night and fewer than half saying the same in Zimbabwe, Kenya and Uganda.
The figures highlight how personal security can influence mobility and economic participation, including where people work, how they commute and whether they can travel after dark.
For African safety-tech companies, however, the opportunity also comes with difficult questions around privacy, data protection, reliability and the ability of technology to function alongside uneven emergency-response infrastructure.
Eluagu believes changing attitudes towards personal safety will be just as important as building the technology.
“We plan for our health and we plan for our money, yet nobody plans for their safety out loud, and instead we whisper about it and hope for the best,” he said.
“I want to take it out of the whisper, so that a teenager heading out at night, a woman taking a new route home, or a family sending a relative off on a trip has a plan for it, the way they would check a map app before deciding what route to take.”
From a Nigerian launch to a bigger safety ambition
For now, Virgua’s immediate focus is Nigeria.
Eluagu is balancing his role at Planet Bottling Company with the demands of building the platform, including working with its design and development teams, preparing its regulatory groundwork and training the people who will support its operations.
Its bigger test will come after launch: whether it can persuade Nigerians to move safety practices already embedded in everyday life from scattered messages and phone calls into a dedicated digital platform.
If that behaviour translates successfully, the opportunity could eventually extend beyond Nigeria.
Many of the underlying problems Virgua is attempting to address, including fragmented safety information, concerns over personal mobility and reliance on informal networks during emergencies, are shared across African markets.
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A Person like Eluaga
For Eluagu, however, the ambition begins with a simpler proposition: people should have useful information when someone they care about may be in danger.
Virgua is betting that the instinct already exists. The business opportunity lies in building the infrastructure around it.
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