Goodwell Investments has invested $2m into Kenya’s Copia, a promising ecommerce business that specializes in supplying products and services to currently underserved consumers in rural Kenya.
With the raise, Copia aims to expand in Kenya and other emerging rural markets across Africa and beyond to continue with its mission of supplying products and services to “Base of the Pyramid” (BoP) consumers.
Dubbed as the Amazon of rural areas, allowing users to access goods that would otherwise be difficult to obtain without travelling to a major city, Copia delivers pre-paid orders on average only two to three daysand saves users $1.5 in transport costs and an hour travel time per order is a huge benefit for people living on only a few dollars per day. All this aligns with the Goodwell strategy of giving more un(der)served people in the lowest income segments access to better quality, more relevant and more affordable basic goods and services.D
Launched in 2013, Copia with just 20 agents, Copia now works with over 3,000 agents, counts some 40,000 customers, and executes over 80,000 orders a month. Since 2015, the company’s revenues have grown significantly year after year. Even so, the growth potential for Copia remains huge as it currently covers around 28% of Kenya and reaches only a minority of households in this area. Looking further ahead, Copia’s total addressable market could comprise several emerging markets in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia as well that represent a potential purchasing power of over $5 trillion a year.
Copia covers rural markets and targets low income households in villages and on large farms, a perfect match for Goodwell’s uMunthu fund which aims to invest up to 50% of its funds in inclusive businesses operating in sectors other than financial inclusion that matter to low income households, either because they spend much of their income or time in these sectors, or because these offer the best opportunities to improve livelihoods.
