Vendease raises $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Partech Africa and TLcom

Vendease, a food procurement platform for African restaurants announced that it has raised $30 million ($20 million equity and $10 million debt) in a Series A funding round led by Partech Africa and TLcom. Other investors that participated in this round include existing investors such as VentureSouq, Hustle fund, Hack VC, GFR Fund, Kube VC, Magic Fund and Kairos Angels.

Founded in 2020 by CEO Tunde Kara, COO Olumide Fayankin, CPO Gatumi Aliyu, and CTO Wale Oyepeju, Vendease’s vision is to solve the inefficiencies in the highly fragmented food sector in Nigeria.

Last year, the YC-backed startup raised $3.2 million to grow its operations across Nigeria. The company’s CEO, Tunde Kara, says the company intends to use the new funds to expand and consolidate its operations in eight cities in Nigeria and Ghana. He also said that it is planning to move into new markets and build new products to increase customers’ efficiency.

In a discussion with Techcrunch, Tunde says, “We’re building technology to efficiently move food from the point of production to the point of consumption. Everything we build at Vendease: financing, logistics, warehousing, inventory management, is tailored towards ensuring that food flows efficiently from that point of production to the point of consumption.”

The platform claims to have moved approximately 400,000 metric tonnes of food for its over 2,000 customers and assisted them in saving about $2 million in procurement costs and over 10,000 in person-hours over the last 12 months.

Tunde says Vendease has saved its customers almost $500,000 in wastage costs due to overstocking by using the businesses’ data and providing them with the necessary resources — particularly around inventory management.

“Since businesses don’t have access to accurate data, they usually buy what they don’t need. We help them to solve that problem in two ways,” Kara commented on the company’s progress. “One, because businesses know they can get anything on our platform in 12 hours, they don’t need to stock some of the things they would’ve stored before. Two, they can also track what they bought and know how much is left before they need to buy again.”

The company has continued to offer its Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) service to its customers but has however changed the format by involving financial institutions to provide the requisite financing through its platform. The company has been able to avail businesses more than $12 million worth of inventory via this embedded finance product.

“Something important to us about our current growth and impact is despite the ongoing global food supply shortage and inflation, Vendease is helping our users save big and provide relative stability for their stock levels. Shielding them (to a large extent) from the most severe effects of the current global shortage,” commented Kara. “What excites us is we can have even more impact as we extend and entrench our technology within Africa and the rest of the world. And that’s what keeps us going.”