Bumpa, the African startup that helps retailers manage and grow their businesses from their mobile phones has announced the close of its $200,000 pre-seed round.
This round had participation 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.
Founded by Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele, Bumpa helps merchants and businesses move their business online; enabling merchants with zero programming skills to set up their e-commerce store using their smartphones.
Bumpa merchants are also able to accept online and offline payments, manage inventory/products, handle bookkeeping, fulfill orders, track sales, request dispatch riders, engage customers easily, and much more on the go with their smartphones.
Since its launch in February 2021, Bumpa has onboarded over 7,000 merchants on its platform with a 50% MoM growth rate. Retail businesses like The Ajala Store and Lash Ng, have been able to move their business online and digitize their business processes. They are also able to understand how their business is doing across multiple channels both online and offline. So far, Bumpa merchants have listed more than 30,000 products and completed over $500,000 in recorded transactions.
The startup also recently got into the Microsoft for Startups, a program for growth-stage startups that gives them free technical consultations, access to corporate partnerships alongside free access to enterprise software including Office 365, Github Enterprise, and Azure credits worth up to $25,000.
Following its raise, Bumpa is looking to empower more small business owners with the tools to grow their businesses. Within the next year, the startup wants to reach 200,000 merchants.
Bumpa will also be expanding its team and rolling out new features to improve support for merchants as it looks to help onboarded businesses grow their sales by at least 20% MoM.
What they are saying
Speaking on the investment in Bumpa, Opeyemi Awoyemi, Venture Partner and founder of Whogohost said, “It’s hard to build a “Shopify” 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 digitize informal markets and create value for millions of existing and first-time sellers”.
Kelvin Umechukwu, Co-founder & CEO of Bumpa said, “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.”
This is interesting and am interested, but I need to learn more and how to get going with this venture
Quite very interesting to me as a business man
I am interested
Very important for the less privelage people
what i want to know is the 2500 for dragging traffic to site