Biasharabot, a Kenyan-based company that develops bots for small and medium sized enterprises to use to streamline their social media marketing and maximize the income has raised $50,000 from Leapfrog Ventures.
Founded by Felix Cheruiyot and Moses Korir, BiasharaBot focuses on helping small and medium sized business sell more on social media providing tools which help increase engagement. BiasharaBot has an ecommerce chatbot that is able to take the customer through the sale process until they confirm their order. Also provides post manager where they can create marketing and schedule for posting on social media at specified times and has a message broadcast feature which allows clients to send bulk messages to messenger accounts of their customers as a way of running promotion or informing customers about new product arrivals.
Recently, BiasharaBot integrated into M-Pesa to offer payment while still on Messenger using M-Pesa express checkout process and fulfilment providers like Sendy and are looking to add others like G4S and Wells Fargo to help clients compare the different cost of each provider and choose the cheapest one. The software as a service product is offered on a monthly subscription fee.
In April, Biashara was one of the three startups selected top at the Demo Day of Pangea, and it aims to now use the cash to develop and release plug-ins for global e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento and sign up up to 1,000 paying merchants then launch in Nigeria and South Africa.
According to the founders, “We noticed a lot businesses do not have resources to employ someone to manage their social media accounts on a full time basis. This means they are not able to engage effectively on social media. Whenever a customer inquiries about a product on social media, if they are not responded to quickly the customer moves on to another seller thus the business misses out on sales opportunity.”
The team added that also businesses do not have time to update their social media accounts regularly missing out on building loyalty with their customer which is critical in establishing repeat business. Many small businesses do not have an engagement tool they can use to inform customers about new products and offers or promotions they are running on a one on one communication. BiasharaBot therefore aims to help them do that!
Leapfrog Ventures recently invested in Rwanda’s Exuus’.
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