Africa’s youngest billionaire and Founder of The Mara Group, Ashish Thakkar, is set to challenge the dominance of WhatsApp in Africa, with the launch of a new messaging App made for Africans across the globe.

The Ugandan businessman, who spoke at the launch of the new Mara Messenger, in Dubai, on Saturday, said that the new app has been custom-made to meet the needs of Africans and will enable them connect with contacts around the world.

“The launch of Mara Messenger marks the dawn of a new era in Africa. For the first time, we will have a truly home-grown messaging platform that is tailored to the individual cultures of the continent,” Forbes quoted Thakkar as saying in an interview.

Thakkar has his sights on WhatsApp, WeChat and Viber, messaging apps he said Mara Messenger will be looking to compete with.

Although there are no specific data for the number of users of the top messaging apps in Africa, The Statistics Portal provided data on the the global user base of WhatsApp and WeChat.

According to the online data source, WeChat had 438 million users in the second quarter of 2014, while WhatsApp had more than 600 million active users as of August 2014, to remain world’s most popular mobile messenger app. These figures are however not frightening to Thakkar, who assured that a couple of newfangled features that the messaging App will offer will earn it a competitive advantage.

Thakkar, who also founded Mara Foundation and Mara Mentor, expressed plan to offer Mara Messenger in multiple languages, across multiple devices, which will make it accessible to everyone across Africa and the world.

“It’s always been my dream to see African innovations going global and Mara Online is one such case in point which further demonstrates that we as Africa can be innovative, can dare to go global, and succeed!” he said.

Mara messenger is now available for free on Android, Blackberry and iOS. It requests for the user’s full name, phone number and birthday, after which it sends a verification code to register users. Once registered, users can edit gender, add a profile picture and a status message. The app include features that will allow users to use instant messaging, share locations, doodle on images and broadcast information to groups.