A $3.2 million financing round has been raised by the startup.
The seed round welcomed investors such as Afore Capital and Y Combinator.
As a last-mile distribution e-commerce company, JABU joins a list of startups across the continent that help small retailers order and stock their products and, at the same time, provide data-driven services to suppliers and manufacturers.
The founder of JABU was David Akinin, who wanted to fix the supply chain and distribution in Namibia.
The platform connects over 6,000 retailers to local and multinational suppliers.
The startup has a fleet of vehicles. Suppliers using the platform can see where their products are being delivered, check their key performance indicators and book merchandising. They can make advertising and marketing campaigns at shops.
For the majority of last year, jabu was in stealth mode. It was the first startup from the country to get into Y Combinator.
According to some sources, up to 15 African startups have been selected by Y Combinator, which is why the startup doesn't appear in our list.
Last year saw venture capital firms and institutional investors scramble to back newly formed and existing business-to-business e-commerce retail startups. One of the earliest in the space, Nigerian B2B e-commerce platform TradeDepot, raised a combined $110 million in debt and equity. Other parts of Africa that have raised investments include Morocco, Egypt, and Ethiopia.
The Southern Africa region has a light shining on it. The company operates in three cities in Africa. Since March, its monthly GMV has grown 25x and the average growth of delivered SKUs is over 50%. The company said that revenue has grown 35x in the past year.
Most African countries rely on cash. Jaipur is making efforts to digitize its physical cash collection processes.
It takes 48 hours for retailers' money to be deposited into the banks. Merchants will be able to deposit and withdraw money immediately in sync with these centers, thanks to the wallet of the jabu.
The banks and others have sat down and asked how can we fix this. We went from having a couple R100,000 a week to having millions of dollars. Akinin said that the company is creating wallet for its merchants because they realized there is something bigger than they had thought.
Merchants will be able to offer other services to consumers on top of their cash in the next stage of the wallet system.
The only way to do that is by partnering with the merchants, and they go through a know your customer process, we make sure the merchants have the right space and the right account to back their float. They do their transactions with their customers. He said that they are entering the B2B2C space through the merchants they work with.
The majority of the revenue comes from distribution or third-party fleets. The company makes money from merchandising and targeted marketing. Merchants will be able to take commission from their transactions in the future.
David Akinin is the CEO of the company.
Akinin spent time at Credit Suisse as an investment banker and also had a stint as a sales and goods analyst. He went to a number of top African cities, but it was in Windhoek that he decided to try something new.
There was a huge demand for housing in the country. Akinin pivoted to a construction company after launching a startup to offer digital mortgages.
Akinin's construction company started a COVID relief program to give food supplies to the people of Namibia. He stumbled upon the country's B2B e-commerce retail opportunity.
The city shut down every single informal retailer we went into. He said that they had developed a software that would like digitize housing demand when they did that.
We hired 40 people from the community and within a couple of weeks we had registered 1,000 shops that had been affected by the shutdown. We realized that there was a huge opportunity to help them reopen, but also that they had no way of getting their products at an affordable rate, and that was very important to them.
Informal retail is still a big deal in Africa. Informal channels such as kiosks and mom-and-pop stores are the majority of sales in Africa. The opportunity is so large that some startups, such as Nigerian B2B retail platform Sabi, said they were processing almost $12 million a month.
Akinin said that the company with more than 200 employees is preparing for a Series A fundraise. The startup will use the seed round and subsequent growth round to expand into other countries, grow its tech and operations team, and train its field agents.
