Most small and medium enterprises in supply chains in Africa get invoices after several weeks and sometimes months. It is an inefficient way of doing business that leads to cash-flow problems, as well as fragmented payment collection and tracking processes.
Recently, startups have taken a top-down approach by targeting a specific sector and delivering solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises. Pivo is a startup that helps freight carriers get paid faster by giving them a bank account, a debit card and digital invoicing tools.
The startup founded by Nkiru Amadi-Emina and Ijeoma Akwiwo has closed a $2 million seed round. The financing will be used to upgrade existing products, build new ones, hire talent and expand outside of Lagos, its first market and other African countries.
Amadi-Emina, the CEO of Pivo, plied her trade before starting the one-year-old startup, which has raised $2.55 million since launch.
Amadi-Emina launched an on-demand delivery platform that was later acquired by one of Africa's most prominent e-logistics players During her time as enterprise account manager and up until she left as head of port operations, she saw the glaring problems that existed at both ends of the logistics supply chain. In order to move cargo, drivers need cash advances from logistics companies, as well as manufacturers who need to pay on time.
Amadi-Emina said in an interview that managing cash flow was the main issue for businesses. A lot of the payments made were made with cash and we thought to build a digital bank that provides financial services geared towards solving these various problems for SME vendors that operate within large manufacturing supply chains, starting first and foremost with thelogistics providers, and then gradually moving to the supplier pockets and
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Pivo uses manufacturing supply chain relationships to deploy financial services to the small and medium-sized businesses within them. The credit play of its platform, Pivo Capital, allows companies to deal with any upfront costs, such as diesel and driver's allowance, that are typically incurred during operations. Small businesses can use Pivo Business to facilitate payments via peer-to-peer transfers and track payments with spend controls. Amadi-Emina said that the features will drive Pivo to capture a large portion of the market opportunity.
Pivo has the first-mover advantage. Though it doesn't seem to have any noteworthy challengers in the freight sector, startups such as Duplo, another YC alum, whose customers are small and medium-sized businesses in the fast- moving consumer goods space, pose serious competition in the long run when the platforms seek out other There is some concern that e-logistics companies can build their own platform in-house.
Pivo is a plug-and-play and embedded solution that is more complimentary than competitive according to the chief executive. If you look at e-logistics firms, the goal is to move towards a platform approach and if at any point in time they want to unlocks financial services, we tell them to come to PIVO.
There is a team called the Pivo.
About 500 small and medium-sized businesses are direct customers of the freight carrier–focused digital bank. According to Amadi-Emina, Pivo Capital has disbursed over $3 million to small and medium-sized enterprises and has a 98% repayment rate. A total of $4.7 million has been registered by the startup so far.
The female-led startup has something to say. Its CEO said there was more growth. Pivo+ is a package of value-added services that the company is working on. One of the investors in this round is Daniel Block, who believes that Pivo is designed to become such a platform because of its commitment to unattended supply chain SMEs.
Amadi-Emina and Ijeoma Akwo are the first all-female founded team of the famed Y Combinator in Nigeria.
As a female-led start-up, we were able to break that barrier. The fact that women can be at the helm of affairs in the tech space is a result of Amadi-Emina getting into YC. There are barriers that keep women out of tech. More people get to see strong female representation from Nigeria when they get into YC because of the news amplification. If you apply yourself and have the numbers to back it all up, you can achieve what you set out to do.
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