Pastel, a startup that helps merchants with their bookkeeping and sales tracking systems, among other things, has secured a $5.5 million seed round headed by pan-African venture capital firm TLcom Capital. Other venture capital firms involved in the seed round included Global Founders Capital (GFC), Golden Palm Investments, DFS Labs, Ulu Ventures, Plug and Play, and Soma Cap. Last year, the business raised a $620,000 pre-seed round from some of its previous investors.

The startup has recorded considerably traction since it was founded. More than 100,000 merchants had signed up for Pastel’s bookkeeping and customer relationship management system by December 2021, according to Okonkwo. More than 45,000 merchant users are now active on the free app.

A Look At What The Startup Does

In a statement, co-founder and chief growth officer (CGO) Okonkwo said that Abuzar Royesh, Olamide Oladeji, and Izunna Okonkwo, all Stanford graduate students, had similar interests in developing solutions for micro and SMBs in emerging markets, particularly from their respective countries of origin: Afghanistan (Royesh) and Nigeria (Oladeji) (Oladeji and Okonkwo).

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The company’s main offering, Sabi, is a digital bookkeeping programme that helps small businesses track and manage their transactions and clients, receive insights into their cashflows, issue receipts, and successfully manage debtors. Contrary to popular belief, this product is not the same as a B2B e-commerce marketplace with the same name.

Pastel has recently added more capabilities to assist shops to elevate their value inside this network. Pastel, on the other hand, has chosen a different approach and developed Quick Receipt and Pastel Financing as separate products, in contrast to other platforms that have bundled several capabilities into a single app.

Over 60,000 active merchant users and simple invoicing and receipts solutions are available to businesses through the Quick Receipt app. On the other hand, the Swift Money app, which uses regional saving organisations known as ajo in Nigeria to finance enterprises, has been covertly developed by Pastel Financing for the past three months.

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The Swift Money app is made to function with established ajo leaders and their organisations. Pastel’s goal is not to take the role of these leaders, but to give them the resources they need to better monitor the welfare of their groups and to finance the members of those groups. The leader instals the app to create profiles for members in addition to dealing with the formalities of cash collecting and depositing money in a [Pastel] bank account for savings. When any of the members — in this case, merchants — want to access loans, the leader submits a request via the app. The member is then assessed for creditworthiness based on their history of saving, and if eligible, a business loan is given to them.

Pastel bookkeeping Pastel bookkeeping

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