Across Africa, funding for firms that help manufacturers and sellers distribute items and merchants access them on a single platform is on the rise.
Capiter, a Cairo-based B2B e-commerce startup, has raised a $33 million Series A round, continuing the trend.
Quona Capital and MSA Capital co-led the investment. Savola, Shorooq Partners, Foundation Ventures, Accion Venture Lab, and Derayah Ventures are among the other investors.
Capiter is a B2B marketplace founded by Mahmoud Nouh and Ahmed Nouh in July 2020. It connects FMCGs, wholesalers, and merchants on one platform, allowing merchants to order products through an eCommerce checkout and get credit for their purchases.
Many Egyptian manufacturers do not have the necessary supply chain infrastructure in place to reach merchants. According to Nouh, manufacturers can only reach 30 % of the market’s merchants, but with Capiter, that percentage goes to 80 % to 100 %.
Additionally, a major percentage of the manufacturers’ end trade occurs through traditional channels, where data and market insights are largely inaccessible.
Capiter claims that machine learning assists these manufacturers in gaining essential insights into the markets they service, the products they sell, and how they compete.
Capiter then attends to three issues for merchants. The first is the inconvenient nature of merchants having to engage multiple suppliers in order to find the proper product. The second is transparency, which entails some price negotiations between merchants and manufacturers. The third issue is that merchants frequently lack access to working capital, making it difficult for them to purchase the correct goods at the right time.
Capiter’s platform supports over 12 different merchant categories, including mom-and-pop shops, hotels, restaurants, cafes, electronic stores, supermarkets, grocery stores, and catering organizations, all of which have their own unique solutions.
Within the next year, the company plans to develop vertically (in terms of buyer type) and geographically as a result of this investment.