Kenya’s MarketForce360 has made it to this year’s Y Combinator Summer camp joining the prestigious alumni of globally recognized startups such as Stripe, Airbnb, Flutterwave, PayStack, Quora and Dropbox. With this development, MarketForce360 will receive $150,000 from the summer batch of 2020 which ran from June through August. The winter batch runs from January through March. Ordinarily, attendees of the camp have the opportunity for networking and connecting with other leaders and executives of startups across the world. But with the COVID-19 lockdown, this year’s Summer batch program would be remotely attended through virtual office hours, evening talks, and meetups held over video conferencing. The Y Combinator (YC) has funded close to 2,000 startups since it began its program in 2005 and the combined valuation of its portfolio is $100 Billion.
The Kenyan startup enables consumer brands to optimize how they deliver essential goods and services to retailers and consumers by bridging the information gap in last-mile distribution, while maximizing efficiency across the sales and distribution value chain. It equally leverages on the power and availability of mobile devices by enabling both employed and independent field agents to record all customer interactions as they happen in the field, from taking orders and feedback to managing deliveries and payments; and will soon be allowing retail outlets to order and pay for goods directly from their nearest supplier, whenever they need them.
Mesozi Group, owners of MarketForce360 see this development as a sign of greater things to come for the group and also a great year for MarketForce because it recently closed a $350,000 seed investment in May to unlock new revenue streams and build the team’s capacity in East Africa. And this is coming after two bootstrapped years of R&D, building the product, and testing across various industries.
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Company sources say that with the quality feedback from its customers MarketForce360 is ready to aggressively grow its customer base as it makes an impact in the expansive African retail and distribution economy. “We are focused on supporting our clients to sell more during this difficult time and plan to raise additional capital within the year to support our efforts,” the source said.
With the YC and Viktoria Business funding, MarketForce 360 is building a suite of solutions which address an African economy where over 90% of the goods and services consumed are sold through an informal network of over 15 million retail outlets and millions of field agents.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry