After acquiring $32 million in a Series A debt-equity round, Ramani, a Tanzanian startup specialising in consumer packaged goods (CPG) supply chains, wants to extend its operations in the country of East Africa.
Following an unknown seed investment round last year, Flexcap Ventures and serial entrepreneur Jared Schreiber led the most recent round, which also raised loans from unnamed investors.
The startup claims that since its launch, it has grown tremendously; last year, the platform’s value of items sold reached $72 million, following a surge in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of 68% month over month during that time. The GMV growth month over month for this year is 36%.
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Ramani claims that its platform is currently being used by 100 active micro-distribution centers (MDCs), and they anticipate that number to increase tremendously as they expand their operations in Tanzania and roll out new services.
A Look At What The Startup Does
The Y Combinator (W20)-backed startup, co-founded in 2019 by Martin Kibet (COO) and brothers Iain Usiri (CEO) and Calvin Usiri (CTO), offers inventory management systems, procurement, and point of sale software to its network of micro-distribution centres, allowing them to improve inventory and operations management.
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These MDCs are crucial in ensuring consumer goods reach the market, but the majority continue to rely on untrustworthy manual processes that are time-consuming, prone to errors, and fail to provide supply chain visibility.
“We deploy our app on a specialized point-of-sale device and a printer, which salespeople use in warehouses to manage their inventory and operations. The data is also accessible on computers, and WhatsApp,” Usiri, the CEO,said.
MDCs may simply track their operations digitally and obtain financing based on the performance of their enterprises by leveraging Ramani’s technology.
The bank of Tanzania just granted the firm a lending licence, and it has already launched a 30-day inventory finance product in the market. Other products, such as a 14-day revolving line of credit that allows distributors in its network to borrow up to $500 interest-free, are in the works.
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“The consumer-packaged goods supply chain is one of the biggest in Africa, but it is grossly underserved by the current financial service providers. That is why we are building bespoke financial services for the supply chain,” said Usiri. “We are currently focused on leveraging financial services in order to monetize because we provide our software for free,” Usiri said, adding that they see a $1 billion revenue opportunity on the lending side, across Tanzania, its only market currently, and in neighboring countries Kenya and Uganda.
Ramani also intends to increase the number of partner brands, which will be critical to the expansion of its distributor network.
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“Brands introduce us to the distributors that they have, and are a big part of what we do. By stitching together all the real-time inventory of each of their resellers and unifying it into a single-brand-view, brands are able to manage their networks better and they can see downstream where their products are being sold. It informs production and marketing plans too. Our big vision is to create this cloud network of micro distribution centers all across Africa as we have built software to help support Africa’s trillion-dollar consumer-packaged-goods supply chain,” said Usiri.
Ramani consumer goods supply Ramani consumer goods supply
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh