Senga, a pioneer in Africa and a cutting-edge Kenyan logistics company that is taking on the incredibly difficult problem of “consolidation” logistics, has announced that EchoVC has made a seed investment in the company.
EchoVC is the first institutional fund to invest in Senga, joining current investors such as two former C-suite executives from EMC and VMware.
Senga has a special method that, by combining and transporting fragmented loads to important supermarkets around Kenya in a series of continuous trips, drastically reduces the delivery times for FMCG companies and other suppliers.
Senga, which was founded in 2016, is credited for eliminating popular, traditional methods of centralised delivery.
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Through Senga, suppliers can deliver and receive inventory in less than 48 hours, as compared to the average duration of 3–7 days. This is a key issue since a delay in items arriving at the supermarket means inventory spends more time in transportation rather than on the shelf to sell, resulting in out-of-stock situations, mismatched ordering, and, ultimately, revenue loss.
“We were intrigued by Senga’s differentiated approach toward an untapped space in African logistics. Additionally, we estimate Kenya’s formal grocery retail market to be approximately $8bn per year of sales, and the transportation costs to move inventory to supermarkets and retailers as roughly $400m per year. A key part of our investment thesis was to back,’’ EchoVC noted in a statement.
According to EchoVC, the investment was principally inspired by the startup’s founder June Odongo.
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“June is attracted to difficult problems, and she views her approach to disrupting logistics as akin to “solving how data packets move in a network”. She was born in Kenya and graduated from high school at the age of 16, following which she moved to the United States and put herself through college — working full-time to raise money for her tuition. She graduated with a Computer Science degree, magna cum laude, and worked at EMC for over 7 years, first as a back-end software engineer, and later as a tech lead where she oversaw the delivery of products that generated over $1bn in annual revenue. Later, she became a Snr. Product Manager at EMC, helping lead the execution of various products before leaving for Harvard Business School. Subsequently, following a role at Cisco Meraki as GM of its mobility software, June decided to create Senga,” the investor concluded.
Senga logistics
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