Building the Rails
for the Next Generation
of Founders
I’m Mercy Nekesa. Computer scientist, entrepreneur, and founder of Zorentia.
The most impactful technology is built by those who deeply understand the problem. Yet, domain experts remain sidelined because technical execution is still a black box. I founded Zorentia to fix that - giving student founders the exact steps, code, and infrastructure to go from idea to live product in 4 weeks. The approach - initially validated via the Westpac New Wave X first prize and a $15k infrastructure pilot - is now live.
Before Zorentia, I bootstrapped Raining Vegetables, an ag-tech company in Uganda to 7,000 farmers, partnering with private, public, and international organisations to improve agricultural outcomes.
Zorentia
Zorentia helps student founders plan, build, and launch their tech startups before they graduate. We walk you through the exact steps to turn a raw idea into a live product on your own server - from figuring out what to build, to generating production-grade code, to deploying with your domain and security locked in. The result is a product you fully own: your code, your infrastructure, your IP. Not a prototype. Not a rented website. A real company.
One-Gram of Tech
Most first products fail not because the idea was bad, but because too much was built before anyone asked for it. One-Gram of Tech (1G) is the framework I built to stop that. It defines the smallest independently useful unit of a product, proves it with real usage, and stacks up from there. Zorentia is built on this methodology. It's how we decide what to build first.
Read the methodology →Selected Experience
Zorentia
I built Zorentia to codify the technical execution path - the part that kills most ideas before they ship. Using the 1G Tech methodology, we walk founders through every phase: defining what to build, designing the system, writing the code, and going live on the internet with full ownership of the stack.
Raining Vegetables (Group)
Engineered and scaled a national ag-tech platform serving 7,000 farmers. Managed the full technical stack, including AWS infrastructure, payment integration, and data architecture, while leading strategic partnerships with Rikolto (Belgium) and the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO).
Secured and managed institutional collaboration with the Agribusiness Development Centre (ADC), an entity established by the Rabo Foundation (Netherlands) and dfcu Bank. Operated at the intersection of international development finance and large-scale technical deployment.
Subsidiary: Sundetails Technologies
Directed the digital transition of small-to-medium enterprises. Developed custom software solutions to replace manual legacy operations with digital workflows and data-driven management systems.
Uganda Christian University (UCU)
Led curriculum development and research mentorship within the Computer Science department. Focused on the transition from academic software research to industry-standard project execution and product management.
Awards & Media
UNSW New Wave Winner
Recognized for early-stage venture architecture and technical leadership within the UNSW ecosystem.
Best Agri-Business
International recognition for sustainable innovation and data-driven agricultural impact.
Best Female Entrepreneur
Awarded for innovation and resilience in building software for the agricultural sector.
Internships (Archive)
Jebbit (Boston) - SWE Intern: Enterprise marketing Infrastructure
University at Buffalo (New York) - Research Fellow: Engineering & Applied Sciences
Fleet by MasT (Baltimore) - Full Stack Intern: Logistics & Fleet Management
ETS (Washington D.C.) - SWE Intern: Secure Financial Systems
Research & Projects (Archive)
Medical NLP Translator
Designed an NLP solution for 2,000+ unsupported African languages. Built an LSTM-based machine translation algorithm for clinical communication.
Journey to Mental Wealth
Full-stack platform for resource mapping and community support mechanisms, focusing on social infrastructure for at-risk demographics.
Panels & Fieldwork
Kampala, Uganda: Panel speaker at the Digital Financial Inclusion Summit, charting a path for inclusive mobile finance with regional changemakers.
Sydney, Australia: Celebrated as the UNSW New Wave 2025 winner for Zorentia.
Sydney, Australia: Panelist at the AI Startup Showcase during the AI in Business and Society launch, speaking as a technical female founder.
Kampala, Uganda: On the left flank of the digital summit panel with ABSA and other bank leaders, outlining how finance can meet modern infrastructure.
Kampala, Uganda: Second from the left with a circle of women founders at the Women in Fintech Summit.
Sydney, Australia: Panel speaker during the Singapore Institute of Technology exchange visit hosted by the UNSW Business School.
Sydney, Australia: Center stage with the UNSW New Wave 2025 women founders cohort, celebrating collective momentum.
Education
Master of Science in Computer Science, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, The State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
Global Impact
YOUCA Ambassador
Thread Mentor
Let's Build.
Zorentia is live for student founders. If you have an idea and need a path to launch, start there. Or reach out directly.