To build e-commerce solutions for retail businesses, Nigeria’s Bumpa raised $200k pre-seed
Bumpa, founded by Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele in February, assists merchants in taking their businesses online without the need for programming knowledge. They may use their smartphone to set up an e-commerce store, take online and offline payments, manage inventory, conduct bookkeeping, fulfill orders, track sales, request dispatch riders, and engage consumers using the platform.
With a 50% month-over-month growth rate, the startup has already onboarded over 7,000 merchants. So far, merchants have listed over 30,000 products and processed over US$500,000 in transactions.
Bumpa has raised US$200,000 in pre-seed investment from Greencap Equity, HOAQ Club, Whogohost Venture Arm, Rizq Investment Group, Microtraction, DFS Labs, Aidi Ventures, Prosper Otemuyiwa, Oo Nwoye, Perfect Makanju, and a few more angel investors. Within the next year, it hopes to reach 200,000 retailers, and it plans to grow its workforce and introduce additional services to help businesses.
“Building the operating system for MSMEs in Africa can be daunting but having the right team, very supportive investors, and the best community of customers makes the work fun to do and a lot easier. I believe that a lot of small businesses will thrive as they begin to take advantage of technology for their growth and I’m very excited about the future of commerce in Africa because of what we are building at Bumpa,” said Umechukwu.
It was difficult to develop a Shopify-like solution that would work effectively for small businesses in Africa, according to Opeyemi Awoyemi, a venture partner and founder of Whogohost.
“The Bumpa team understands this well – it took me less than a minute to set up a shop on Bumpa. They are building fit-for-market tools that will digitise informal markets and create value for millions of existing and first-time sellers,” he said.
