Former IROKO founder starts Bamba, raises $3.2M for African micro-merchant software
Bamba, a firm that was established by Bastian Gotter, a former IROKO co-founder, recently made the announcement that it has obtained seed capital in the amount of $3.2 million. The funding round was led by 468 Capital, and it also included participation from Presight Ventures, Jigsaw VC, and high-profile angel investors including Mato Peric, Leonard Stiegeler, and Laurin Hainy.
“We truly believe entrepreneurship is essential to prosperity, so we make running a small business easier by building mobile-first small business software for Africa. This investment allows us to scale the platform, the team and gives us access to insights from our high calibre of investment partners,” Bastian Gotter, Founder & CEO, Bamba said.
The company will be able to expand its team and grow up its app with the support of this.
Why The Investors Invested
Ludwig Ensthaler, Partner, 468 Capital commented: “We are thrilled to invest and support the team and vision at Bamba. We feel that the investment opportunities in “enterprise” software focused on small businesses in Africa are significant and remain largely untapped. We believe that Bamba is well placed with a great product and a solid founder to build a category-defining company.”
Fabian Hansen, Investor, Presight Ventures added: “We appreciate entrepreneurs that build novel solutions that push boundaries and are thrilled to support Bamba’s potential impact across the small businesses ecosystem in Africa.”
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Dan Jones, Partner, Jigsaw VC commented, “Bamba sits at the intersection between cash and mobile money, between payments and credit. We believe there is a significant opportunity in this space and are keen to explore it with Bastian.”
A Look At What The Startup Does
Founded in 2022, Bamba is a business software designed specifically for use on mobile devices, aimed at African micro-merchants. It focuses on straightforward tools that merchants can use to manage their customers, keep track of their inventory, receive and process payments, and secure cash advances based on their expected future cash flow.
The company claims that it is currently operating in “stealth mode” and will utilize the newly raised funding to expand its user base across 12 sub-Saharan African nations that have strong mobile money adoption, broaden up its mobile product offer, and scale its engineering team.
The acceptance of mobile money payments by registered and unregistered merchants reached over $250 billion in 2021, marking a significant expansion in the industry.
The combination of receiving and making payments with cash or mobile money introduces new complexity for merchants. On the other hand, it presents potential to further digitalize business payment and record-keeping procedures.
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This process of digitalization has the potential to significantly enhance access to credit, which is one of the most major obstacles that is hindering the expansion of small enterprises in Africa.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) assesses the unmet demand for small business lending in Sub-Saharan Africa at $331 billion. The mobile application that Bamba offers helps to improve both the overall experience of making payments and the micro businesses’ access to credit. This application is at the center of the digitalization process.
More than half of all jobs in sub-Saharan Africa are supported by micro, small, and medium-sized firms, which account for 90 percent of the total number of businesses in the region.
Bamba micro merchant software Bamba micro merchant software
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