Just a few hours after Kalahari announced a merger with Takealot, Nigeria’s Konga.com, the country’s top online retailer has raised $40m Series C round from South Africa’s internet and e-commerce builder Naspers and Swedish investor Kinnevik to ramp up its technology team and build a huge fulfilment platform.
The funding led by Naspers, Kinnevik and Konga‘s other investors shows their believe in and the potential of the growth of e-commerce in Africa and in Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy and the most populous nation. This also shows the investors faith in Konga‘s vision of building an operating system for commerce in the region. The operating system for commerce will involve substantial and wise investments in technology, logistics and people – especially engineers according to sources close to Konga.
“We understand that the task before Konga is not easy. But we also understand that ecommerce will be hugely transformative and redemptive for Africa and Konga has an opportunity to play a huge role in that. Funding from smart investors allows us to right to bring our vision for African ecommerce to fruition,” our sources told us. “We are hoping to expand our engineering team. We are also looking to build out a dedicated logistics and fulfilment platform to help us deliver as well as accommodate merchants from the whole of Nigeria. Finally, some investments in core retail inventory is on the cards.”
In February this year, Naspers invested $50m into Konga.com for a 50% stake and later the firm announced it had raised $25 million series B funding from Swedish’s Kinnevik and South Africa’s Naspers.
The firm’s post raise valuation now stands at about $160m – $190m, which is good news for not only Konga, but Nigeria as well and more so the firm’s employees who own part of the company. Konga’s valuation increased rapidly over the past year making many employees who are shareholders wealthy on paper. Over 60 employees of Konga are shareholders.