Bumpa secures $4M seed to drive social commerce in Africa
African social commerce startup, Bumpa has raised $4 million seed to help underserved SMEs grow and manage their business
According to Statista, Nigeria houses 41 million MSMEs that contribute 50% of Nigeria’s GDP. However, despite these numbers, business owners across the country deal with daily issues like a lack of trust, payments, technology and marketing.
Founded in 2021 by Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele, Bumpa (formerly SalesCabal) wants built to provide affordable and stable websites to SMEs in Nigeria. Although Salecabal solved the problem of giving SMEs an affordable way to start selling online, the team would discover that the e-commerce space had more significant problems and equally held more promise than they thought.
Armed with the knowledge of the industry and the initial success of what had been achieved with Salescabal, Adetunji and Kelvin launched the first version of the app to make selling online easy for business owners.
The first version of the Bumpa app provided free websites for business owners in 60 seconds and other business management solutions such as the ability to record sales, receive payment, manage orders & inventory, issue invoice &receipts, send bulk SMS and emails to customers, and receive business reports all from their mobile device anywhere and everywhere in the world.
What's next for Bumpa?
To continue the drive for social commerce in Africa, Bumpa has raised a $4 million seed from Base10 Partners with participation from Plug & Play Ventures commerce fund, SHL Capital, Jedar Capital, Magic Fund, DFS Labs, FirstCheck Africa Angel Program, E62 Ventures, Club14, and Fast Forward Ventures.
With the latest investment, the startup intends to expand its product offerings, embedding more social commerce solutions for the growing number of African SMEs in need of digital solutions. These features, integrations, and connections will give SMEs more control over how they manage and scale their business.
In addition to market expansion, Bumpa will also be expanding its team with a focus on Marketing, Engineering, and Business roles as it prepares to help more merchants achieve business success. Interested applicants should keep an eye on the startup’s career page.
"The goal is to do three things: connect, innovate and scale. Bumpa 2.0 for us as a startup is to connect all the relevant tools, channels, and places that SMEs need all in one place: the Bumpa app. It is also to innovate by bringing simpler, automated ways to do any business transaction or operation on the app. It is also to scale our user’s businesses, our position as key players in the African commerce industry, and to scale the capacities and reach of the employees and even we, the founders," Kelvin Umechukwu, CEO of Bumpa, said.
Related Article:The state of MSMEs in Nigeria
Inside Bumpa's pre-seed era
In 2021, Bumpa secured a $200K pre-seed led by Opeyemi Awoyemi of Fast Forward Venture Studio Fund. A few months after, it also received a $50K grant from the Google Black Founder Fund.
This pre-seed round enabled the startup to hire an undisclosed number of employees. Bumpa also rolled out user features like discounts and coupons, custom domain names, Facebook pixel integration, staff accounts, and multi-currency checkouts.
Following insights from internal data that showed that 40% of the transactions on Bumpa came from Instagram, the startup completed integration with Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram—that made selling on Instagram faster for business owners that sell on social media.
"Bumpa is building a mission that we love and were excited to get behind, enabling e-commerce and reducing friction for millions of SMBs, "Luci Fonseca, Principal at Base10 Partners, said. "The more we spent time with Kelvin and Teejay, the more we saw that they are very special founders and have a powerful mission to build the defining e-commerce platform in Nigeria and across Africa."
