MarketForce, the Kenyan-based end-to-end retail distribution platform for consumer brands in Africa, has raised a $2 million pre-Series A round from Launch Africa, V8 Capital, Future Africa, GreenHouse Capital, Rebel Fund, Remapped Ventures, and some unnamed angel investors.
Existing investors like P1 Ventures and Y Combinator also participated in the round.
MarketForce has now raised a total of $2.5 million, which includes its $350,000 seed round last year and $150,000 from Y Combinator.
Tesh Mbaabu and Mesongo Sibuti founded MarketForce in 2018. The startup connects Africa’s informal retail outlets and consumers directly to suppliers of consumer goods and financial services by digitizing orders, delivery, and payments with the aim of solving the last mile distribution challenge.
Its B2B “RejaReja” marketplace which was launched in December 2020, enables informal shops to source, order, and pay for inventory at any time via interactive SMS and mobile app, and get it delivered within hours, saving them time and money that they would have had to spend if they closed shop and went out to look for stock.
Recently, MarketForce acquired another Kenyan retail platform Digiduka. The platform allows informal retailers to resell digital services like airtime, electricity tokens, and bill payments. Digiduka’s acquisition saw that it was fully integrated into RejaReja, which now provides a wallet for retailers to act as agents and collect mobile money and bank payments via mobile app, WhatsApp bots, or USSD shortcodes.
With this round of funding, MarketForce plans to launch RejaReja in Nigeria and scale up the product across more towns in East Africa. The startup has a presence in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, where over 15,000 retail customers use RejaReja to process thousands of orders daily.
Meanwhile, MarketForce’s trademark SaaS product has over 10,000 monthly active users. These users have performed 300,000 transactions worth more than $500 million since its launch in 2018. MarketForce clients include Pepsi, Safaricom, Fort Beverages, Lami, and Platinum Credit among others.
Commenting, Managing Partner at Launch Africa, Zachariah George, said in a statement.“MarketForce has proven that they know how to leverage the entire retail supply chain as a gateway for digital payments.
“Their organic, as well as acquisition-driven growth and expansion strategy thus far, has proven that their understanding of unit economics and marginal customer acquisition costs is solid. As a pan-African fintech company, they are very well positioned to tap into the $700 billion that gets transacted in this space every year,”
