Kenya’s Marketforce, a B2B retail end-to-end distribution platform has closed a $2 million pre-series A round.
Investors in this round include P1 Ventures, Y Combinator, Launch Africa, V8 Capital, Future Africa, GreenHouse Capital, Rebel Fund, Remapped Ventures, and others.
Founded in 2018 by Tesh Mbaabu and Mesongo Sibuti, the founders wanted to solve the fragmentation issue they noticed among small retail shops and their distribution networks. These shops are often used as points for offering financial services to the everyday Kenyan.
MarketForce’s play enables the optimized distribution of FMCG goods and financial services through this network of agents. According to TechCrunch, the retail startup got into Y Combinator because they utilize FMCG distribution networks. However, upon graduation from Y Combinator’s Summer batch, MarketForce decided to test its hands on a new product, RejaReja.
RejaReja was launched in December 2020. The platform helps informal retail merchants buy and sell FMCGs and digital financial services. With RejaReja, MarketForce joins a growing list of startups like TradeDepot and Sokowatch trying to revamp supply-chain markets for Africa’s informal retailers.
RejaReja provides next-day delivery for hundreds of stock-keeping units (SKUs) from a few FMCG brands. The founders believe that RejaReja represents most of the company’s best opportunities.
In June 2021, Digiduka, a retail platform founded in Kenya, was acquired by MarketForce. Digiduka allows informal retailers to resell digital services like airtime, electricity tokens, and bill payments. MarketForce’s acquisition of Digiduka allowed it to fully integrate with RejaReja, which provides a mobile wallet for retailers to act as agents for payments and collection via a mobile app, WhatsApp bots, and USSD shortcodes.
What you should know
MarketForce plans to launch RejaReja in Nigeria and scale up the product across more towns in East Africa.
After its seed round of $350,000 and $150,000 cheque from Y Combinator as part of the accelerator’s Summer 2020 batch, this new funding brings the startup’s total funding to $2.5million.
The startup has a presence in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, where over 15,000 retail customers use RejaReja to process thousands of orders daily.
