Bumpa, a Nigerian startup that helps retailers manage and grow their businesses from their smartphones, has raised $200,000 in pre-seed funding to expand its reach and add new features.
Bumpa, founded by Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele in February, assists merchants in taking their businesses online without the need for programming knowledge. They can use their smartphone to set up an e-commerce store, accept online and offline payments, manage inventory, handle bookkeeping, fulfill orders, track sales, request dispatch riders, and engage customers using the platform.
With a 50% month-over-month growth rate, the startup has already onboarded over 7,000 merchants. So far, merchants have listed over 30,000 products and processed over US$500,000 in transactions.
Bumpa now plans to expand more quickly after banking US$200,000 in pre-seed funding, which comes from Greencap Equity, HOAQ Club, Whogohost Venture Arm, Rizq Investment Group, Microtraction, DFS Labs, Aidi Ventures, Prosper Otemuyiwa, Oo Nwoye, Perfect Makanju and a few other angels. It wants to reach 200,000 merchants within the next year, and will also be expanding its team and rolling out new features to improve support for merchants.
“Building the operating system for MSMEs in Africa can be daunting but having the right team, very supportive investors, and the best community of customers makes the work fun to do and a lot easier. I believe that a lot of small businesses will thrive as they begin to take advantage of technology for their growth and I’m very excited about the future of commerce in Africa because of what we are building at Bumpa,” said Umechukwu.
Opeyemi Awoyemi, venture partner and founder of Whogohost, said it was hard to build a Shopify-like solution that would work well for small merchants in Africa.
“The Bumpa team understands this well – it took me less than a minute to set up a shop on Bumpa. They are building fit-for-market tools that will digitise informal markets and create value for millions of existing and first-time sellers,” he said.