Digital commerce startup, Bumpa gets $4 million seed to continue to deepen social commerce in Africa 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.
41 million MSMEs contribute 50% of Nigeria’s GDP. Yet, the country’s retail sector is broken. Most small businesses don’t have access to technology and marketing dollars.
Bumpa is among the host of B2B e-commerce startups in Africa working to digitize the continent’s informal retail market.
Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele, founded Bumpa (formerly SalesCabal) in 2021. Their mission was to help anyone easily sell online. And they did this by providing online sellers (MSMEs) with simple and easy-to-use websites in Nigeria.
Salescabal became Bumpa when the startup launched an app to make selling online easy for business owners.
The app allowed business owners to create an online storefront for their businesses in 60 seconds as well as business management solutions.
Users of the app could 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 devices anywhere and everywhere in the world.
Businesses also had access to discounts and coupons, custom domain names, Facebook pixel integration, staff accounts, and multi-currency checkouts.
The Numbers Behind Bumpa’s Funding
Bumpa currently has over 50,000 SMEs on its platform, with 40% monthly active users. The startup has recorded over 400K product listings and $20 million in order value.
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.
What will the $4 Million be Used for?
With this investment, Bumpa will expand its product offerings, embed more social commerce solutions for the growing number of African SMEs in need of the ability to control how they manage and scale their business.
Bumpa will also be expanding its team especially focused on Marketing, Engineering, and Business roles asbot looks to scale its mission of helping merchants sell online successfully.
Interested in a career with Bumpa, then keep an eye on the startup’s career page.
Kelvin Umechukwu, CEO of Bumpa, had this to say:
“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,”
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.
Luci Fonseca, Principal at Base10 Partners had this to say about Bumpa and the deal:
Bumpa is building a mission that we love and were excited to get behind, enabling e-commerce and reducing friction for millions of SMBs.
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.”
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