Inside Kenya’s Crowdpesa | Mobile Marketplace For Shoppers & Merchants

Crowdpesa is a mobile marketplace for both Merchants and Shoppers to transact easily using existing mobile money services such as MPesa.  Crowdpesa provides Shoppers with a mobile application that allows them to find and pay for offers they care about. The application’s mobile wallet allows shoppers to make one click payments for offers posted by merchants.

Crowdpesa also provides merchants with a point of sale service where they can receive and track payments made for offers.

TechMoran talked to  John Karanja, VP Product development and Information and this is what we learned about the startup.

The Crowdpesa Core Team include Chief Executive Officer (Co-Founder) – Patrick Maina, in charge of  strategy development and execution. He is an Intellectual Property lawyer by profession with a passion for software development and sales. Email: [email protected]VP Product & Information (Co-Founder) – John Karanja also Founder of Whive.com (a Mobile and Web social media platform where people interact using different forms of media with over 120,000 members). With his expertise in software development and growth hacking John will lead the product development and growth at Crowdpesa.  Email: [email protected]Business Development Manager – Christian Kakoba
Christian Kakoba has academic qualifications in Business and Informatics and is in charge of Business Development at Crowdpesa. He speaks both French and English and as such is also the company’s day to day spokesperson. Email: [email protected]

Have you won anything since you began?
Crowdpesa has been featured in several media channels and was recently named among the 30 brilliant tech startups in Africa by Memeburn. Crowdpesa was in the first class of DEMO AFRICA October 2012 and was also a finalist at Pivot East Mobile competition in June 2012.

Any Competitors?
Mocality.co.ke, Sahizi.com, MyOrder.co.ke

Are you funded or bootstrapping?

We are Self-funded at the moment,but our immediate funding requirements  are USD 355,000.  We would also like to get exposure for our business and find the right strategic partners for our early growth. We are also seeking early growth funding to up-scale our service as well as roll out out to more merchants. We would also like to recruit more team members to fill critical roles like Sales & Marketing as well as Financial Management.Is there market for Crowdpesa?

The growth of mobile phone use in Africa and around the world offers an unprecedented opportunity to reach more consumers directly. Crowdpesa leverages its Location Based Application and Mobile Wallet to provide an online shopping experience for goods and services on mobile devices. Our test bed market is East Africa, however our goal is to develop a service that can scale globally.Any partnerships?

We are integrating with mobile money platforms like Mpesa, Airtel Money, Mobikash to allow people to buy goods on the go.Is the going smooth?

Reaching potential customers with limited budget is one big challenge and building partnerships has not been easy for us. Your future plans?

We plan to launch with over 50 merchants and partners by January 2013.