Nigerian startup Bumpa, which helps retailers manage and grow their businesses from their mobile phones, has closed a US$200,000 pre-seed funding round to help it reach more merchants and add more features.
Launched in February by Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele, Bumpa helps merchants move their business online without the need for programming skills. The platform allows them to set up an e-commerce store using their smartphone, accept online and offline payments, manage inventory, handle bookkeeping, fulfill orders, track sales, request dispatch riders, and engage customers.
The startup has already onboarded over 7,000 merchants, with a 50 per cent month-on-month growth rate. Merchants have so far listed more than 30,000 products and completed over US$500,000 in recorded transactions.
Bumpa now plans to expand more quickly after banking US$200,000 in pre-seed funding, which comes 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 other angels. It wants to reach 200,000 merchants within the next year, and will also be expanding its team and rolling out new features to improve support for merchants.
“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.
Opeyemi Awoyemi, venture partner and founder of Whogohost, said it was hard to build a Shopify-like solution that would work well for small merchants in Africa.
“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.
