Nigerian SME Automation Platform, Bumpa, Raises $4 Million in Seed Round

Bumpa, a Nigerian SME accelerator, has announced it has raised $4 million in seed funding in a round led by Base10 Partners, a multinational VC headed by serial entrepreneur, Adeyemi Ajao.

Base10, said to be the largest black-led fund in the world and with a portfolio that includes:

• Instacart
• Notion, and
• Nubank

Base10 was joined in the round by several participants including:

• Plug & Play Ventures
• SHL Capital (Sahil Lavingia, CEO of Gumroad)
• Magic Fund
• Jedar Capital
• DFS Labs
• FirstCheck Africa Angel Program
• E62 Ventures
• Club14
• Fast Forward Ventures

Bumpa works with small businesses in Nigeria which do not have the resources to implement modern business tools and solutions such as analytics.

With 48% of Nigeria’s GDP coming from SMEs in the last 5 years, the retail automation platform seeks to build an infrastructure to power online commerce and enable African business owners start, manage, and grow their businesses from their mobile devices.

According to Bumpa CEO, Kelvin Umechukwu:

“Bumpa exists to give superpowers to small business owners; helping them launch their business online with a website they can manage on their mobile device.”

However, this is just one of the services the startup is filling in a list that is designed to make Africa’s online businesses more competitive in an increasingly digital continent.

Other services include:

• Manage their inventory
• Engage their customers
• Keep online records of their inventory
• Sales and customers
• Get detailed analytics of their business across all the channels they sell

“Nigeria is home to over 40 million of these small and medium enterprises (SMEs) today, but the day-to-day of a small business owner is still riddled with a lot of manual & offline processes, mistrust, lack of records, and inefficiencies.” – CEO, Bumpa

Umechukwu chronicled some of the impacts the platform was already making, including about an early adopter of Bumpa who has had her weekly sales increase from 15 to 200 orders per week.

Bumpa, whose app also lets business owners on its platform conduct their business with customers on Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp, also helps with website management and online sales.

One of Bumpa’s customers is ReshapeMe. According to Umechukwu:

Until now, Bumpa says it has:

• Worked with over 50,000 businesses
• Helped its clients record over 200,000 orders, and
• Enabled its clients trade a gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $20 million

The startup is looking to scale its operations with various open remote roles.

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