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 traveled with his INSEAD cohort to Shenzhen. Their friend arranged for a car to take the group's luggage directly to the hotel — unaccompanied. Nobody rode along. Nobody tracked it. When they arrived that evening, the luggage was already there. Intact.
He recognized something precise in that moment: not surprise, but the absence of anxiety. Offering the same arrangement to friends in Cameroon would be unthinkable — not because Cameroonian people are less trustworthy, but because no system makes trusting a stranger the rational default.
Roland has produced events in Cameroon for over two decades — concerts, corporate productions, large-scale gatherings where dozens of service providers have to commit and deliver. He's watched service failure up close: no-shows, substitutions, disputes over verbal agreements. Not because of bad people, but because no infrastructure made consistency the default.
He lives the client side of the same gap. Order a taxi in Europe and a specific category arrives — clean, on time, matching the description. Order the same in Cameroon and the outcome is completely different. Same expectation, two different results. The difference isn't the driver.
Same problem on both sides of the market: not character, not culture — absence of infrastructure. Fix that and the rest unlocks.
We didn't start by asking "how do we build a better marketplace?" We started earlier — what structural conditions make trust the default the way it is in functional markets?
Each layer of Lianka answers a specific way service transactions fail. Identity verified in person means no ghost vendors. A written Statement of Work means scope can't shift mid-job. Escrow means payment follows delivery, not trust. A Controller on high-value jobs gives "done" an external definition. Lianka Certified turns good behavior into social capital and a competitive edge.
Together, they make defection economically irrational — so trust becomes the default, instead of a gamble.
Lianka draws from 廉 (Liàn) — a Chinese virtue historically applied to those entrusted with power over others. It means incorruptible. Honest under pressure, when dishonesty would be easy.
Paired with a name that sounds rooted in Cameroon, Lianka carries a single promise into every booking: professionals you can trust, every time.
Engineer by training, strategist by practice. Aime's career has been inside industries where trust is designed in — not assumed. That lens shaped Lianka: trust at scale is an engineering problem, never a character one.
Two decades producing events across Cameroon taught Roland the mechanics of service failure — no-shows, substitutions, verbal disputes. He brings the ground-level operational knowledge that turns a trust framework into something that actually works in Yaoundé and Douala.
Launching in Yaoundé and Douala 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.