Prosus's AI Gambit: Arming Millions of Merchants to Redefine Commerce

AMSTERDAM, NL – June 23, 2026 – Global technology investor Prosus N.V. has fired a strategic volley that reverberates far beyond its Amsterdam headquarters, launching a two-pronged AI offensive designed to reshape both enterprise and consumer markets. The introduction of ToqanClaw, a no-code platform for businesses, and Zapia, a consumer-facing AI life assistant, is not merely a product release; it's the culmination of a multi-year strategy to weaponize its vast, proprietary data ecosystem. This move signals a deliberate maneuver to bypass the crowded field of general-purpose AI models and create a defensible moat built on commercial intelligence.

The Democratization of AI for Main Street

The first pillar of this strategy, ToqanClaw, is aimed directly at the millions of small and medium-sized businesses that form the backbone of the global economy—and Prosus's partner network. The platform allows anyone, from a café owner to a logistics manager, to build custom applications, analytics dashboards, and complex automations simply by describing their needs in natural language. The promise is revolutionary: eliminate the need for costly engineering teams and long IT queues, putting the power of AI directly into the hands of the operators who need it most.

Built on Prosus's internal AI platform, Toqan, the system intelligently routes requests across more than 20 different AI models to find the most efficient and cost-effective solution. Critically, Prosus guarantees that all partner data remains within its secure environment and is never used to train third-party models—a crucial selling point in an era of heightened data privacy concerns.

The results, even in early use, are compelling. Dutch café chain Lebkov & Sons used ToqanClaw to slash its financial reporting process from weeks to just 30 minutes, contributing to a 40% year-on-year revenue increase. In Rotterdam, Burger & Frites built a delivery analytics agent that boosted deliveries by 25% and cut overtime by 60%, saving the business a reported €21,000 per month. Meanwhile, Poke Perfect reduced routine staff questions by 70% with a custom operations assistant accessible via WhatsApp, freeing employees to focus on customer service. These are not marginal gains; they are transformative efficiencies that can mean the difference between survival and growth for small businesses.

The New Front Door to the Digital Economy

While ToqanClaw fortifies Prosus's business-to-business ecosystem, its consumer-facing counterpart, Zapia, aims to redefine how individuals interact with the digital world. Positioned as an AI assistant that gets things done, Zapia moves beyond the conversational query-and-response model of Siri or Alexa. It is an agent designed to execute multi-step tasks autonomously.

A user can ask Zapia: "Find a restaurant in Barcelona for eight people this Saturday at nine, with good vegetarian options. Drop the shortlist in the family WhatsApp, wait for everyone to vote, and book it." The platform then orchestrates the entire process, from search and communication to final reservation. This represents a fundamental shift away from an app-centric world, where a user juggles multiple services, to a single, conversational interface that manages the underlying complexity.

Already a quiet powerhouse with over 6 million users, Zapia's rapid adoption was fueled by a smart market entry in Latin America. By integrating deeply with WhatsApp and tailoring its functionality to local cultural contexts, it achieved significant organic growth before its global launch. With its freemium model, offering a robust free tier for most personal use cases, Zapia is poised to capture a significant user base worldwide.

As Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi stated, “AI life assistants are the biggest shift in how people interact with the digital economy since the smartphone. The future isn’t about opening ten apps to plan your week... You'll simply tell your assistant what you want, and it will get it done.”

The Strategic Engine: Data, Ecosystem, and a Commerce Brain

These two platforms, while serving different audiences, are powered by the same strategic engine: Prosus's formidable data advantage. For years, the company has been building a specialized AI model for commerce, its Large Commerce Model (LCM). Trained on proprietary data from over a billion customers and 500 million daily interactions across its global portfolio—spanning food delivery, e-commerce, and travel—the LCM is effectively an operating system for understanding how people buy.

This is the core of Prosus's strategic play. Bloisi articulated it clearly: “Everyone has a good AI model now. That's not the advantage anymore. The question is who has the data, the context, and the loops that make it actually useful for a real business.” By developing its own specialized model, which is reportedly 60 times cheaper to run for its use cases than leading general models, Prosus has created a powerful, cost-effective intelligence layer that competitors cannot easily replicate. The LCM doesn't just process language; it anticipates commercial intent, enabling hyper-personalization and proactive assistance.

This in-house capability provides the intelligence for ToqanClaw to build relevant business tools and for Zapia to execute complex consumer tasks. It connects a sprawling ecosystem of merchants and consumers into a flywheel, where insights from one side fuel better services on the other. This maneuver positions Prosus not just as an investor, but as a central nervous system for a significant slice of the global digital economy.

Navigating the Competitive Gauntlet

Prosus is not entering an empty arena. The no-code business tool market is fiercely contested by giants like Microsoft, with its Power Apps and Copilot integration, and established players like Zapier, which is also moving into AI-driven automation. However, Prosus’s advantage lies in its vertical integration. It is not offering a horizontal tool for any business; it is offering a deeply integrated solution for its own massive, captive ecosystem of 5 million partners, supercharged by a commerce-specific AI.

On the consumer side, Zapia faces entrenched competition from the native assistants of Apple, Google, and Amazon. Its success will depend on its ability to prove it is meaningfully better at task execution, a claim its early traction in Latin America supports. The key differentiator is its focus on action over information retrieval.

By launching both platforms, Prosus is making a calculated bet that its unique data assets and ecosystem-first approach can create a durable competitive advantage. The company is leveraging its deep understanding of commerce to build tools that are not just intelligent, but immediately useful and commercially relevant, signaling a new phase in the global AI power struggle.