Nigeria’s eCommerce solution, Bumpa has secured $4 million in a seed funding round led by Base10 Partners, the largest black-led fund in the world, with participation from Plug & Play Ventures (through their commerce fund), SHL Capital (Sahil Lavingia, CEO of Gumroad), Magic Fund, Jedar Capital, DFS Labs, FirstCheck Africa Angel Program, E62 Ventures, Club14, and Fast Forward Ventures.
The funding will be channelled into developing the future of commerce for African sellers. The startup will also look to boost its team strength by hiring more talent.
Launched in February 2021 by Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele, Bumpa gives superpowers to small business owners; helping them launch their business online with a website they can manage on their mobile devices, manage their inventory, engage their customers, keep online records of their inventory, sales and customers, and get detailed analytics of their business across all the channels they sell.
Bumpa is trusted by over 50,000 small business owners today, from people who have been running their businesses for years, to some who are just starting out and are seeking the easiest way to start, to students that are looking for ways to earn an extra income and to those who need a support system.
Nigeria is home to over 40 million of these small and medium enterprises (SMEs) today, but the day-to-day of a small business owner is still riddled with a lot of manual & offline processes, mistrust, lack of records, and inefficiencies.
Big businesses have the resources to pay for expensive tools and hire a lot of staff to help them drive growth and marketing, collect and analyze data for better decision-making, use their records to access credit, and optimize or automate their processes to save time and money.
All these have not been available to small business owners for years now, most of them are a one-person team trying to figure out the chaos day-to-day by themselves and with little or no resources. Bumpa exists for small business owners.
So far, Bumpa has supported its customers to record over 200,000 orders and trade a gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $20 million. In August, the startup released its integration with Meta, which greatly improves how businesses that sell on Instagram, collect payments, store their buyer’s information, support the buyer through their buying decision, request payments, and share invoices/receipts all from the Bumpa app and without the buyer needing to leave Instagram.
“We started working on this because the data suggested that 40% of all orders on Bumpa are from social media, and it took us a few months, but the effort, hard work, and meetings with the Meta Messaging team paid off when we saw how our customers are using this feature,” the company stated.
Kelvin Umechukwu, CEO, Bumpa said, “In the past few months, we have introduced a set of innovations into the commerce space, including our introduction to social commerce with our integration with Instagram, a better way to run online sales with discounts & coupons, business reports across all sales channels, and many others. All of these were made possible with a small team of 18 amazing people. As a Bumpa merchant, you should expect to see a lot more connections to other channels and services you use on a day-to-day basis.
“We will continue to abstract the complexities and reduce the fragmentation to achieve higher standards of retail automation on the continent; with payments, socials, logistics, credit, analytics, etc.; providing you with innovative ways to manage and grow your business.
“We will also be investing in hiring more talented people to join the team, people that will be dedicated to your business growth and will do all they can to see you succeed, through building products, sealing partnerships, providing you with 24/7 support, and figuring out ways to grow your businesses.”
