Aime saw effortless trust operate at scale in Asia — and realized it couldn't exist in Cameroon. Roland spent 20 years watching service reliability collapse under the weight of no accountability. Together, they decided to build what was missing.
In 2023, Aime travelled with his INSEAD cohort to Shenzhen. Their friend Winnie — a local — picked them up from the airport and had one goal: make sure they experienced every moment of the city. So she arranged for a car to take their luggage directly to the hotel, leaving the group free to spend the whole day exploring without bags weighing them down.
Nobody from the group rode with the luggage. Nobody tracked it. Winnie made the arrangement, and everyone simply went about their day.
Aime felt something precise watching this unfold: not surprise, but recognition of absence. He knew that offering the same experience to friends in Cameroon would be unthinkable — not because Cameroonian people are less trustworthy, but because there is no system that makes trusting a stranger the rational, low-anxiety default.
That was the moment the question formed — a question he couldn't let go of.
Roland spent over two decades building and running events — concerts, corporate productions, large-scale gatherings across Cameroon. In that world, everything depends on people showing up on time, doing what they said they would do, with the equipment they promised to bring.
He watched this fail, repeatedly. Not because of bad intentions, but because there was no system to make consistency the default. Gig workers would agree to terms and not show. Vendors would substitute materials and deny it. Clients would dispute deliverables with no written scope to reference. Entire concert productions would teeter or collapse because the accountability infrastructure simply didn't exist.
Roland experienced the same frustration in his personal life. When he's in Europe, he books a taxi and a specific category arrives — clean, on time, matching the description. When he's back in Cameroon and does the same thing, the experience is completely different. The car doesn't match. The condition doesn't match. The professionalism doesn't match.
It is the same human being making the booking. The difference is entirely in the system on the other end.
One founder reached this conclusion from the outside — observing a system that worked. The other reached it from the inside — watching a system that didn't. The diagnosis was identical. The solution would be the same.
Every service failure in Cameroon traces back to one of these — and Lianka is engineered to close all three.
When a professional has no traceable record, every client treats them as a stranger — regardless of actual skill or character. Anonymity makes trust structurally impossible, not just difficult.
When a bad job costs a professional nothing — no lost reputation, no financial penalty — there is no systemic incentive to deliver. Good behavior must carry economic weight to be reliable at scale.
When payment and delivery happen simultaneously, the weaker party absorbs all risk. Escrow realigns incentives: both parties have a stake in a successful outcome before any money moves.
Aime and Roland came back from their respective observations with the same mission: build the infrastructure that makes trust the rational default for every service transaction in Cameroon.
Every professional on Lianka is verified in person — national ID, address, judicial record, professional guarantor. The record is permanent and cannot be gamed.
Payment is held by Lianka until the client confirms the job is done right. The professional cannot be stiffed. The client cannot lose money on a no-show. Both sides are protected.
Reviews only from verified, completed, paid jobs. A professional's Lianka record becomes their most valuable career asset — and it is impossible to fake.
Every job starts with an agreed Statement of Work. No verbal understandings. No price surprises. Roland's event industry discipline, applied to home services.
This is not a lifestyle problem. It is an economic infrastructure problem — one that suppresses real activity at national scale.
Every year, billions of CFA in potential economic activity go unrealized in Cameroon — not because demand doesn't exist, but because the system makes executing on that demand irrational.
The diaspora — Cameroonians living in Europe, North America, and across Africa — are among the most financially capable customers for home services. They want to renovate family properties, hire staff, run errands, organize events. They do not. The reason is always the same: they cannot find someone they trust to execute without supervision.
Companies and institutions face the same wall. HR managers cannot hire contractors with confidence. Property managers cannot run maintenance programs reliably. Corporate facilities teams cannot maintain predictable service quality. The friction is not price — it is the absence of accountability infrastructure.
Plumbing, electrical, cleaning, renovation. The most frequent, most personal, and most trust-sensitive category. Where Lianka starts.
A multi-billion CFA industry where accountability failures are catastrophic. The infrastructure Lianka builds applies directly.
Companies that cannot reliably hire contractors lose operational efficiency they can measure. The addressable spend is significant.
The name Lianka draws from 廉 (Liàn) — a Chinese virtue historically applied to those who hold power over others. It means incorruptible. Honest under pressure, when dishonesty would be easy, and when no one is watching.
It was not the virtue of someone who had never been tempted. It was the virtue of someone who had every opportunity to take a shortcut — and didn't. The standard applied to those entrusted with other people's property, time, and money.
Paired with a name that sounds rooted in Cameroon, 廉 becomes Lianka — carrying a single promise into every transaction: professionals you can trust, every time. Not because they have no other option, but because the system makes trust the better choice.
Not outsiders who discovered a market gap. Two people who grew up around this friction, built careers inside it, and decided it was time to fix it.
Trained as an engineer at UC Berkeley and sharpened as a strategist at INSEAD, Aime has spent his career inside industries where trust is not optional — highly regulated, operationally heavy environments where a failed system costs real people real money and accountability is designed in, not assumed. That background gave him a specific lens: trust at scale is always an engineering problem, never a character problem.
The 2023 INSEAD trip gave him a question he couldn't put down: why does trust operate effortlessly in some systems, and collapse entirely in others? He spent months in the research — Chinese social credit mechanics, platform escrow design, the architecture behind accountability at scale — before returning to Cameroon to build the answer. Lianka is what happens when that discipline meets ground-level field research: 50+ homeowner interviews in Douala, 30+ professionals across 6 trade categories, and a model stress-tested from both sides of the market.
Roland has spent over 20 years producing events — concerts, corporate productions, and large-scale gatherings that require dozens of service providers to coordinate, commit, and deliver. In that time, he has seen the mechanics of service failure up close: the no-shows, the substitutions, the unresolvable disputes over verbal agreements.
He has also seen the gap from the client side. The taxi that doesn't match what was ordered. The service quality that is completely different depending on whether you're in Cameroon or Europe. The frustration is personal, not theoretical — and it has made Roland exacting about what accountability infrastructure actually has to do to work.
Launching in Douala and Yaoundé in 2026. Home services first — and that is just the beginning. Join the waitlist for early access, or reach out if you want to understand the full picture.