Nigeria’s eCommerce B2B startup, Alerzo, raises $10.5m to expand across Nigeria and introduce new products

Alerzo, an eCommerce B2B startup based in Nigeria, announced that it has raised $10.5 million in a Series A funding round led by New York-based Nosara Capital. FJ Labs and several family offices from the U.S., Europe and Asia. This brings total raised since inception to more than $20 million. Early investors in the business include the Baobab Network and Signal Hill that participated in its $5.5 million seed round last year. The company also closed a $2.5 million working capital facility.

Founded in 2018 by Adewale Opaleye and based in Ibadan, Alerzo is a mobile B2B trade platform that connects retailers in emerging markets directly to consumer goods brands for ordering and delivery. Its focus is to reduce the turnaround time for the ordering and supply of consumer goods for SMEs.

Opaleye claims that Alerzo has a network of up to 100,000 small businesses, 90% of which are owned by women. The company exclusively serves the country’s tier-2 to tier-4 cities in Southwest Nigeria — Ibadan, Ekiti and Abeokuta. It connects retailers to local and multinational distributors of consumer brands, like Unilever, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Dangote, and PZ.

To place orders, retailers send an SMS, voice and WhatsApp message to Alerzo and the items will be delivered to them in less than 10 hours. The company claims to have processed over 1 million orders in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

According to Opaleye, the new funding will be used to expand across Nigeria, starting with the northern region. It also intends to launch AlerzoPay, a cashless payments and lending platform, as well as new services to support the business.

Alerzo also has an office in Lagos and another office in Singapore which serves as a regional hub to identify best practices among similar high-growth businesses operating across Southeast Asia and India and adapt them to the Nigerian market.

According to Ian Loizeaux, the managing partner at Nosara Capital, in a statement; “We’ve studied informal retail marketplaces globally over the last couple of years and Alerzo really stood out to us due to a strong management team led by a founder with a unique understanding of his customer and an attractive business model with exceptional unit economics.”

“The company is at the beginning of a compelling multi-decade opportunity to streamline and digitize Nigeria’s retail supply chain” he added.