Built in Nairobi for plants where the link drops: Factora IoT opens pilots, bringing sensors and an AI copilot to the emerging-market plant floor

The industrial IoT module of FactoraERP turns plant readings into named alerts, work orders and batch records, and lets plant teams ask an AI copilot about their own data. It is built for factories in East Africa and elsewhere.

NAIROBI, Kenya, 18 October 2026. Tamalaki Business Network Ltd today opened pilots for Factora IoT, the industrial IoT (IIoT) module of its cloud manufacturing ERP, FactoraERP. The module connects sensors on machines, cold rooms, tanks and meters to a plant app that includes an AI copilot and links to FactoraERP's AI Factory Copilot. It is built for factories, including plants in East Africa and plants elsewhere.

Factora IoT starts from a particular kind of plant: one where the cloud link can drop, where there is no data science team, and where readings are still written on clipboards. That describes many food and agro-processing plants in emerging markets. Factora IoT was built in Nairobi for those conditions, and it records the readings continuously.

Designed for the conditions on the floor

Sensors measure temperature, humidity, vibration, energy, level, flow, door state and machine state. Industrial gateways bring the readings in over Modbus, OPC-UA, PLC connectors or token-authenticated HTTPS. Authenticated MQTT is on the roadmap. Gateways connect outbound over LTE or Ethernet, so no inbound port is opened into the factory. When the link drops, they buffer readings and sync them later. Hardware is multi-vendor, chosen after a site survey and quoted per site.

From a reading to a named person, a work order and a batch record

When a reading breaches a limit, the person on shift receives an alert by WhatsApp, SMS or email. The alert escalates if nobody takes it, and every acknowledgement is recorded against a named person. The plant app covers the live floor, alerts, shift handover, OEE, energy and maintenance, and includes Ask, a copilot that answers questions about the plant's data. Stage conditions stay with the batch that was in the room, and the plant can produce a PDF record.

AI that works on the plant's own records

Factora IoT is built to feed FactoraERP. Downtime, counts, energy and quality data become maintenance work orders, batch records and cost, and this exchange is set up during implementation. In FactoraERP, the AI Factory Copilot answers plain-language questions across production, stock, procurement and finance. It also forecasts demand and yields, flags yield, cost and stock anomalies, and drafts reports. It needs no model training and no data science team, and customers' operational data is never used to train shared models.

“A sensor reading that stays on a dashboard is only a notification. With Factora IoT, a reading reaches a named person on the shift, becomes a work order and stays with the batch, and our copilots let a plant manager ask about the plant in plain language instead of hunting through charts. We would rather show a factory its own measured baseline than promise savings we have not measured.”
— Isaac Mwendwa, Founder & CEO, Tamalaki Business Network Ltd

Pilots, and what the company does not claim

Agro-processing comes first: tea, dairy and grain milling, including a proposed pilot at a Kenyan CTC tea factory. Pilots are also open for food and beverage, cold chain, energy, water and other sectors. The company publishes no savings figures before a plant has a measured baseline, and a pilot sets that baseline in its first measured month. Demo data in the product stays labelled as demo data.

Plants can request a pilot at factoraiot.com or iot.factoraerp.com. The full release for African media is at factoraiot.com/news/factora-iot-ai-copilot-plant-floor.

About Tamalaki Business Network Ltd

Tamalaki Business Network Ltd is a Nairobi-based company, incorporated in Kenya in 2018, that designs, owns and operates AI-native platforms for African industry. Its products include FactoraERP (factoraerp.com), a cloud manufacturing ERP with a built-in AI Factory Copilot for food and agro-processors, and Factora IoT (factoraiot.com), its industrial IoT module.

Media contact

Isaac Mwendwa, Founder & CEO
Tamalaki Business Network Ltd
ipm@tamalakibn.com · +254 116 441 861

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