Seed

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Africa

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Levant

Abu Dhabi

Ali Rampurwala

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Investment in Startup

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Vastly Valuable Ventures

Investing In Vanguard, Visionary, Valiant Founders

Nairobi

Grant

MarketForce

Fintech

Financial Services

MarketForce bridges the gap in retail distribution by delivering an end-to-end platform that enables consumer brands to deliver essential goods and digital financial services to retailers and consumers in Africa.

Plend

Consumer Lending

Syntegra

AI/IoT

Duplo

Termii

Digital Marketing

Ramped

EdTech

Identitypass

Developer APIs

Grey

Finance

WePlayed

Lagos

Renda

Logistics

Transportation

Supply Chain Management

Giza

Qardy

Lending

Banking

Qardy is Egypt’s 1st online lending marketplace for financial
institutions to fund MSMEs. Qardy offers the fastest and easiest access to financing through a
fully-digital experience through partnerships with top financial institutions in Egypt.

Raise

MarketForce, the retail B2B and end-to-end distribution platform founded in Kenya, has raised $40 million in Series A funding for its merchant inventory financing and expansion across Africa.

MarketForce, which was launched in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda last year after growing beyond Kenya and Nigeria, plans to introduce buy now, pay later (BNPL) options to help merchants access fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) on credit. It also plans to enter additional markets in East and West Africa.

Through its merchant super app RejaReja, informal traders can source goods (hundreds of SKUs) directly from manufacturers and distributors, make and pay for orders digitally, accept payments for utility bills and access loans for their businesses. The RejaReja retail marketplace was launched in 2020 as a brainchild of MarketForce, a SaaS product for the formal markets, founded by Tesh Mbaabu and Mesongo Sibuti in 2018.

“Our mission is to enable SMEs to grow, and what we’ve realized over time is that offering them loans is great, but that we need to empower them to access goods. And that’s why we’ve introduced this merchant inventory financing, which is like an overdraft facility, where they’re able to order goods and pay later after selling them. We started a pilot and it is going well,” MarketForce CEO and co-founder Mbaabu told TechCrunch.

During the pilot, Mbaabu said that order stock value tripled, underlining the demand for such tailored inventory financing options for traders who sell a huge chunk of all the FMCGs sold across sub-Saharan Africa.

“We’re very deliberate about extending working capital and that’s why we raised some debt and also because we are looking at that fintech angle as our big frontier for the next phase of our business,” said Mbaabu.

This latest round (equal amount of debt and equity) brings the total funds raised by MarketForce to date to $42.5 million. It also comes seven months after the startup raised $2 million in a pre-Series A round.

The latest round was led by V8 Capital Partners, a London and Lagos-based African-focused investment vehicle with participation from Ten13 VC, SOSV Select Fund, VU Venture Partners, Vastly Valuable Ventures and Uncovered Fund. Existing investors that took part in the round include Reflect Ventures, Greenhouse Capital, Century Oak Capital and Remapped Ventures. Cellulant co-founder Ken Njoroge, who joins the MarketForce board as chairman, also took part in the round.

MarketForce raises $40 million Series A, introduces BNPL merchant stock financing

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