Nigerian Startup Milsat Powers New National Digital Postcode
Quick Reads
- Nigerian geospatial startup Milsat built the technology behind Nigeria’s new National Digital Postcode System, which gave every addressable building an 11-character code starting October 1.
- Milsat also mapped more than 65 million properties for Nigeria’s National Population Commission ahead of the country’s first digital census.
- The company has already expanded regionally, deploying its mapping technology in Sierra Leone after starting with a 2023 postcode pilot in Nigeria.
Nigerian geospatial startup Milsat built the technology behind the country’s new National Digital Postcode System, which went live on October 1, giving every addressable building in Nigeria an 11-character digital location code.
The company was founded by Taslim Salaudeen and Adedamola Baderinwa and is headquartered in Abuja. Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy Bosun Tijani publicly credited Milsat for the work, calling it proof of “the depth of Nigerian technical capability.”
Before Milsat, Salaudeen built UpNepa, a now largely forgotten student project, while studying at the Federal University of Technology, Akure.
Facing constant power outages in his off-campus hostel, Salaudeen and a classmate, Abdurrahman Salaudeen, built an app that notified students in real time where electricity was available nearby, saving them the nightly scramble to find a stable outlet to study and charge devices.
The app later won Most Innovative Startup at an Akure Tech Hub event in 2018, an early sign of the problem-solving instinct that would carry into Milsat years later.
Milsat’s path to the national rollout started small. The company delivered a pilot postcode project in 2023 before scaling its system nationwide for the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST), which led the program with Milsat as technical partner.
An automated processing system, led by Milsat CEO Salaudeen, converted satellite imagery into basemaps and pushed them to more than 25,000 field agents simultaneously, in under 15 minutes. A locally built mobile mapping tool then let teams capture every building and road in the country in under nine months.
From Census Mapping To A National System
Milsat’s work extends well beyond the postcode project. The company supported Nigeria’s National Population Commission in mapping more than 65 million properties ahead of the country’s first digital census, and has already exported its enumeration area demarcation technology to Sierra Leone, marking an early step toward regional expansion.
The new postcode system uses GIS technology to assign each building a unique, verifiable digital identity, intended to support deliveries, banking, emergency response, and access to public services in a country where conventional addressing is often missing or unclear. Nigerians can look up their postcode through postcode.gov.ng.
Officials, including Tijani, have pointed to Milsat’s trajectory, from a 2023 pilot to national infrastructure, as a model for Nigerian companies building domestic solutions with the potential to scale across Africa.
