About
A knot you have to be clever to untie
Nyansapo Labs LLC is a software company in East Lansing, Michigan. The name comes from Ghana, and so does the problem we started with.
The name
Nyansapo — the wisdom knot
Nyansapo is an Adinkra symbol from the Akan people of Ghana. Adinkra are visual proverbs — each one a shape that carries an idea — and this one is the wisdom knot. It stands for wisdom, ingenuity, intelligence and patience.
The proverb attached to it is usually translated along the lines of"only the wise can untie the wisdom knot". The point is not that the knot is decorative. It is that some problems do not yield to force, and knowing where to pull is the whole skill.
That is a fair description of good software. The difficulty in a school's fee ledger is not that the arithmetic is hard — it is knowing which thread to pull so the whole thing comes apart cleanly, and having the patience to do it in the right order.
We took the name because it sets a standard we would have to keep, and because it says where the work started. The mark on this site is our own abstract knot, drawn for the company — not a reproduction of the traditional symbol, which belongs to the people whose proverb it is.
Who is behind it
From a classroom in Ghana
[FOUNDER PHOTO]
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Lemuel Agur Mensah
Founder, Nyansapo Labs LLC
- B.S. Computer Science, Michigan State University (2026)
- CompTIA Security+ certified
- Former teacher in Ghana
Before computer science, I taught in Ghana. Fee collection at the school ran on a paper receipt book and a spreadsheet, and someone reconciled the two by hand at the end of every term.
Parents paid in installments — a bit at the start of term, more when a harvest came in — which is a completely reasonable way to pay and a nearly impossible thing to track on paper. By the middle of term nobody could say with confidence who still owed what. Families were chased for money they had already handed over. The office spent the week that should have gone to teaching adding up columns instead.
That is not a failure of effort. It is what happens when the only record of who owes what lives in two places that have to be married up by hand.
I went on to study computer science at Michigan State University, graduating in 2026, and certified in CompTIA Security+ along the way — which matters here, because the thing I wanted to build holds a school's money and a list of its children. Sukuu is the system that office needed, built the way software handling those two things ought to be built.
Nyansapo Labs is the company around it. The aim is a short list of tools that do their one job properly, for the kind of place that has been making do without them.
The company
Where we are
- Legal name
- Nyansapo Labs LLC
- Registered in
- Michigan, United States
- Based in
- East Lansing, Michigan
- Products
- Sukuu · in development