One engineer. Two companies. More coming.
Zimbabwean. Raised between Bulawayo and Johannesburg. Lives in Seoul. AI/ML engineer (MSc, Korea University), record producer (Ebstar / The ESØTËRIC Ones), Forbes BLK 2024 inductee. Ebstar is the public-facing parent identity. Ebenworks is the corporate paperwork.
Ebstar is the parent identity.
Ebenworks is the holding identity.
Ebstar is what the music, the macro-influence, the personal brand answers to. Ebenworks is what the engineering org, the corporate paperwork, and the operating companies sit inside.
Same person. Two registers. Use Ebenezer Tarubinga in formal contexts and quotes. Use Ebstar when the music side or personal-brand side is in scope. The Ebenworks site uses Ebenezer; ebstar.co handles the rest.
Why build companies instead of one product?
Because the brief is the user, not the category. A product locks you into a category. A company can have one product today and a different product tomorrow. A group of companies can have any product, any category, as long as the user passes the test.
I’m not building a tech company. I’m building a company that has tech companies in it. For now. Ebenezer Tarubinga
Two more lines he comes back to often, in his own words: “Every line of code is mine to defend” (on shipping solo). “Loneliness shrinks when someone is next to you. Technology can hold that seat, at least until a human can” (on Chingu). The Imali line, the receipt they never got, the credit profile they’ve always deserved, is the company tagline; you’ll see it on the Imali page.
How we got here. In honest order.
Not a fundraising deck timeline. The actual sequence.
Bulawayo · childhood
Grew up watching the informal economy keep families alive in spite of, not because of, the system. Learned what it means to be invisible to a balance sheet.
Johannesburg · engineering
Started writing software for fintech and AI work. Saw exactly which populations the “next-gen banking” pitches always left out.
Seoul · Korea University
MSc in AI under an IEEE Fellow. Two papers in Neural Networks and at IJCNN. Stayed for the work, the language, and what 인공지능 / AI policy looked like up close.
Ebstar · the music side
5M+ streams. Independent. Distribution and brand built without a label. The personal brand became the parent identity.
Imali · first company (live)
Built end-to-end. WhatsApp business OS for SA’s 1.7M informal merchants (FinScope 2024). Live at imali.ebstar.co. 1,208 tests. POPIA-first. Onboarding in Gauteng & Western Cape.
Chingu · second company (deployed)
Korean voice AI for seniors living alone. Backend, dashboard, family app, senior app deployed. 181 tests. PIPA-aligned. KISA cert target Q3 2026. KONEPS vendor registration post-seed.
Ebenworks · the holding
The corporate paperwork that lets the next company get started without recompiling the brief. The mission is the constant. The industry is the variable.
What I haven’t done yet.
The credibility comes from saying it plainly.
No paid municipal pilot for Chingu yet (first paid invoice targeted Jan 2027 after a Q3 to Q4 2026 free pilot). No public revenue number for either company yet. KISA certification target Q3 2026, not before. POPIA registration filed; number prints here on receipt. Korean entity registration in progress; 사업자등록번호 prints here on issue.
Solo on engineering through Q4 2026, while still in a day-job at Gractor. Hiring plan funded by the round: Senior Backend Dev (M1 to M2), Community Ops SA (M2 to M3), WhatsApp Dev (M3 to M4), BD/Partnerships (M4 to M6), optional CTO (M6 to M9). Imali has community partners and a part-time field team in Soweto and the Western Cape.
Imali lending pipeline: Lula (sub-4% NPL, IFC-backed, embedded in Yoco/Vodacom/Takealot), Standard Bank (Adrian Vermooten, Head SME Banking Innovation; $4M into Nomanini), Merchant Capital (R17B+ disbursed to 70K SMEs). Exploratory; LOIs targeted within 12 months of close.
The next year is about turning each of these “not yet”s into a sentence with a number after it.