Kenya E-commerce Sokowatch Raises $125M, Changes Its Name To Wasoko
Kenya e-commerce Sokowatch raises $125M, changes its name to Wasoko
Nairobi-based e-commerce platform Sokowatch has announced a $125 million funding round with a total value of $625 million. In the United States, Tiger Global and Avenir Growth Capital were the primary investors in the funding round.
Sokowatch has attracted new investors, including Binny Bansal, co-founder of Indian e-commerce firm Flipkart, and Sujeet Kumar, CEO of Udaan, India's largest business-to-business e-commerce platform. Kumar will join the Sokowatch board of directors in order to bring "advice and experience" from the Asian market to the organization.
According to Sokowatch founder Daniel Yu, the $125 million raised will be used to aid in the ongoing expansion of the company's operations in the cities of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast and Dakar in Senegal in Francophone West Africa, where it currently operates. The company also plans to expand into Nigeria and South Africa, possibly through acquisitions, in the future.
As both an asset platform and a marketplace for the distribution of high-demand consumer goods from suppliers to retailers, Sokowatch fulfills both roles. Through its mobile app and SMS service, it allows retailers in all of its operating countries to place orders with suppliers for same-day delivery to their stores and shops through a network of logistics drivers in the region.
Buy now, pay later options are provided by Sokowatch, as well as competitors TradeDeport and MarketForce, to retailers in need of working capital to place orders for additional inventory. Aside from that, the e-commerce platform offers financial services, such as the ability for shop owners to make purchases of goods.
Similar to this, the company has announced that it will change its name to Wasoko in the near future. Because of the company's recent expansion into the Ivory Coast and Senegal, Yu told TechCrunch, the company needed to revamp its image. The company will benefit from this as it transitions from being an East African player to becoming a pan-African player during its next growth phase.
Yu was reported to have said:
"Someone has to be in charge of establishing and maintaining Africa's infrastructure. It is because of this infrastructure that we have been able to expand rapidly into other related fields." African informal retail is worth approximately $600 billion, according to Sokowatch, making it a significant market that has not yet been fully exploited.
The Wasoko network's more than 50,000 active retail customers have received more than 2.5 million deliveries since the company's inception in 2016. In the last year, according to Techcrunch, the company's revenue increased by more than 500 percent, and it has increased by 1,000 percent since 2019.
Because of the company's universal employee equity policy, this increase benefits Wasoko's 800 employees, who are also shareholders in the company as a result of this increase.
