Social-commerce platform Tushop Raises US$3M In Pre-seed Funding Round
A pre-seed fundraising round brought in US$3 million for Tushop, a social-commerce network based in Kenya that enables communities in Nairobi to buy food at lower prices and receive free delivery of their orders.
It was spearheaded by 4DX Ventures, and investors including JAM Fund, Breyer Capital, Chandaria Capital, TO Ventures, Golden Palm Investments, FirstCheck Africa, and DFS Lab participated in the funding round.
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Wasoko, formerly known as Sokowatch, also joined to make their first strategic institutional investment into Tushop, indicating their trust in the team’s capacity to seize the opportunity presented by community group purchasing in Africa.
Additional participation came from a number of angel investors, including GB (CEO of Flutterwave), Raja Kaul (President of Sundial Group), Eli Pollak (CEO of Apollo Agriculture), and Ida Mannoh. The round was oversubscribed (Director of Growth, Chipper Cash).
The round is aimed at growing Tushop’s team, investing in tech to make its platform as easy to use as possible and to further expand across Nairobi before rolling the service out to other cities in Kenya.
“Tushop is unique in this market because we know the customer — we are our customers! We have grown up experiencing the problem of unaffordable food on the one hand and the need to have additional ‘side hustles’ on the other because of persistently low incomes,” Cathy Chepkemboi, Founder & CEO at Tushop, said. “We also have first-hand experience of the difficulties manufacturers face when moving goods through a fragmented supply chain, which creates distance between them and the customers they serve. We are therefore hyper-focused on delivering a superior experience for suppliers, ‘side-hustling’ Community Leaders, as well as our end-customers in an integrated manner.“
A Look At What The Startup
Tushop was established in 2021 with the primary goal of making it easier and less expensive for Kenyans, and eventually all Africans, to obtain the food and household goods they need.
When compared to shopping for groceries in supermarkets, dukas, or at “mama mbogas,” community group purchasing may provide customers with savings of up to 60 percent on food items while also giving the extra convenience of free delivery.
Tushop employs people they call “Community Leaders,” who are responsible for managing door-to-door deliveries and compiling orders from their neighbours.
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This not only makes the last-mile delivery process easier, but it also provides the Community Leaders with an extra revenue stream for coordinating and delivering orders. Similar community group-buying enterprises in other areas, such as Nice Tuan in China and Favo in Brazil, have found great success. Nice Tuan is one such company, while Favo is another.
“We are stoked to be working with some of the leading investors globally and locally who really understand the African space from a logistics, tech, and payments perspective, and look forward to justifying their faith in us with future growth, commercial success, and meaningful social impact,” Cathy added. “Wasoko’s investment in us is also a validating signal of the work we’ve done so far and we look forward to working closely with them to scale Tushop.”
Tushop social-commerce Tushop social-commerce
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