Insider sources say Tunde Kehinde, Jumia’s co-founder and Managing Director has resigned.
Kehinde co-founded Jumia with his business partner Ghanian Raphael Afaedor last year. The two are both Harvard Business School graduates.
Jumia, an online retailer now selling to over 500,000 customers monthly was launched with seed funding from Rocket Internet and have since raised over $75 million. The two have also employed over 600 in Nigeria and expanded across Africa to Morocco, Egypt, Kenya, Ivory Coast, and South Africa.
Before Jumia, Kehinde was working at Diageo in the UK while Raphael was working with Notore Chemical Industries as its Marketing and Sales head for West, Central & North Africa. Tunde’s first try at internet entrepreneurship was when he co-founded Bandeka.com, an invite only dating site for young African professionals.
Just a little history, Kehinde and Raphael began with Kasuwa, in a move expected to help shoppers in Nigeria avoid Lagos traffic, long queues at physical malls and save their time. Just after a few days of work in June 2012, Kasuwa got seed funding from Rocket Internet which brought on board its money, people, concepts and technology.
After a few legal issues the lads had to change their name from Kasuwa to Jumia and in September the same year, Jumia merged with Nigerian online fashion store Sabunta, another Rocket Internet backed startup.
With much hours of working, Jumia has gone ahead to launch a 12,000 sqft warehouse, launch pick-up points across the county and has raised money from firms such J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Millicon among others.
TechMoran has contacted Jumia Nigeria for finer details but as at the time of writing this post they haven’t responded.
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