African eCommerce Round-Up #3

This is a fortnightly round-up of news, events and investments that have happened in the African eCommerce and retail-tech space. This edition covers 1st to 13th July 2021.

✏️ My Work

Sizing & Spotting Opportunities

My latest article offers an alternative way to size the market in Africa and startup ideas for those looking at retail tech and eCommerce solutions. Read it here.

💰Investments & Exits

Ghana 🇬🇭 : Jetstream, a cross border logistics technology provider, announced a $3 million seed funding round (equity and debt) to help them accelerate their growth. Read the announcement here.

Kenya 🇰🇪 : Marketforce360 announced a $2M pre-series A round of financing. They want to use the money to expand into Nigeria and grow their B2B wholesale marketplace dubbed RejaReja. In total, they have raised $2.5 million. Read the announcement here. The expansion to Nigeria could be seen as a defensive move to enter the largest FMCG market in SSA, excluding SA, to ensure they have a significant market share. B2B wholesaling marketplaces are springing up all over the continent. See the next two posts below.👇🏾

Egypt 🇪🇬 : MaxAB, a B2B e-commerce platform, announced a $40 million in a Series A round. IFC, Rise Capital and Endeavour Catalyst participated in the transaction. They will use the money for expansion into the region, MENA, not SSA. Round-up #1 featured another Egyptian B2B wholesale marketplace, further illustrating how competitive this industry will be. Read the announcement here.

Morocco 🇲🇦 : Chari, a B2B eCommerce platform, announced that it had been accepted into YCombinator (YC). YC is the most prestigious startup accelerator in the world. Acceptance is usually a positive signal to investors. Thus expect Chari to announce more investments soon. Read the announcement here.

Egypt 🇪🇬 : ShipBlu, a delivery-as-a-service for eCommerce websites, announced it had been accepted into YC and also announced an undisclosed pre-seed investment led by Nama Ventures. Read the announcement here.

Egypt 🇪🇬 : Odiggo, a car parts marketplace connecting customers and sellers, also announced its acceptance to YC. Read the announcement here.

🚀Launches

Nigeria 🇳🇬 : PayPecker launches with two products Omni & Go.

If it lives up to its founder's vision, Paypecker will be a game-changer for eCommerce. At the granular level, they are aiming to build the "switch" for African retail.

A network switch routes communication from the sender to the intended recipient. A payment switch facilitates real-time account settlement across banks. A switch handles billions of requests per minute without breaking. It is this analogy that Olumide (D.O.), Paypecker's founder, is referring to.

They describe their two products as follows:

"GoDigital helps retailers digitalize and super-charge every aspect of their retail operations; and Omni helps retailers offer seamless experiences to shoppers across all sales channels, offline and online... Omni is to commerce what switches are to payments. Payment switches mutate physical cash into bits to facilitate real-time, massively scalable exchange of value (money) from Buyer to Seller. And the Omni commerce switching infrastructure mutates physical inventory into bits to facilitate real-time, massively scalable exchange and delivery of value (inventory) from Seller to Buyer."

Read more about Paypecker here.

📢 Announcements

eCommerce Retailer Copia Expands to Uganda

Unlike other eCommerce businesses that are built to be tech-focused and asset-light. Copia has built its eCommerce business by being asset-heavy and tech-light. They buy and resell a select number of SKUs from manufacturers and distributors, then sell them via Copia agents spread across some rural towns in Kenya. Once orders are placed, they are dispatched from their warehouse and delivered to their agent's shop, where the customer picks the item from.

They now have 30,000 agents across the country, and a month ago, they cross the 1 million customer mark. Their expansion to Uganda will likely follow the model developed in Kenya. Read the announcement here.

BeautyClick Appoints New Board Members

Three months after announcing their intention to list their business on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, BeautyClick, an online cosmetics company, has announced the appointment of two new board members. The two new board members are Mical Agina, a tax expert and Centum Investments executive and Terryanne Chebet, an entrepreneur and seasoned communications professional. Read the announcement here.

🌎 Other Relevant News Worldwide

Bezo steps down after 27 years

Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO on July 5. He remains the Executive Chairman of the board. Bezos is famous for his shareholder letters. Read an excellent summary of all of them here.

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