Sabi, Africa’s fastest-growing B2B marketplace has closed a $6 million bridge round to drive expansion.
A bridge round is a small round of funding to tide a startup over until its next larger round of funding.
The round was led by pan-African VC firm, CRE Ventures. This bridge round is coming a year after closing a $2 million seed round from CRE Ventures, Janngo Capital, Atlantica Ventures and Waarde Capital.
What you should know about Sabi
Anu Adasolum, Rensource’s former COO, and Ademola Adesina, Rensource’s founder and CEO, founded the company in 2020. Sabi is working to solve the continent’s greatest GDP contributors’ access problem by providing them with critical financial and business tools such as loan services, company performance reporting, and digital inventory management.
Sabi also assists merchants on its platform in finding new customers, improving cash flow, streamlining logistics, and gaining access to selected B2B service providers. Sabi serves as a link between businesses and their customers. Sabi merchants deal with FMCG products as well as products from other industries like as agriculture, electronics, and chemicals.
Over 175,000 merchants use Sabi, and over $200 million in B2B transactions have been completed. Sabi’s network is additionally served by over 10,000 agents.
Sabi makes money by charging merchants a transaction fee when they make a sale on the marketplace. The company also earns a margin for providing financing to them.
In terms of growth and expansion, Sabi is growing an average of 40% month on month in Nigeria and intends to replicate this growth in other African countries like South Africa and Kenya. The startup also aims to launch a subscription model, in which agents would pay a monthly fee to have access to a reseller platform.
What they are saying
Pardon Makumbe, co-founder and managing partner of CRE Venture Capital, said, “Sabi’s online and offline approach to serving informal businesses, combined with the quality of its platform and service provider curation, has clearly taken root in Nigeria. The company is on track to be one of the fastest-growing African companies of 2021 and is showing no signs of slowing down.”