Bumpa, a Nigerian mobile-based inventory management and online store builder has closed a $200, 000 pre-seed funding from a host of investors including Microtraction, Whogohost Venture Arm, Greencap Equity, Aidi Ventures, Rizq Investment Group, DFS Labs, HOAQ Club, and a handful of other angel investors.
Launched in February 2021 by Adetunji Opayele and Kelvin Umechukwu, Bumpa is a cloud retail application that allows merchants and retailers to collect customer data and engage with them on their different social networks or via traditional media. The startup takes business from offline to having a complete online presence with a storefront and a companion mobile app to collect customer data in their brick and mortar stores.
So far, the startup has onboarded more than 7,000 merchants, recording a 50 percent growth rate and more than 30,000 products have been listed with a recorded transaction worth US$500,000. Bumpa will deploy the new funding to reach 200,000 merchants and expand its support team.
“Building the operating system for MSMEs in Africa can be daunting but having the right team, very supportive investors, and the best community of customers makes the work fun to do and a lot easier.
“I believe that a lot of small businesses will thrive as they begin to take advantage of technology for their growth and I’m very excited about the future of commerce in Africa because of what we are building at Bumpa,” said Umechukwu.
Opeyemi Awoyemi, venture partner and founder of Whogohost, said: the simplicity of Bumpa is what attracted him to Bumpa and the fact that SMEs without any technical knowledge can easily build their store and start selling.
“The Bumpa team understands this well – it took me less than a minute to set up a shop on Bumpa. They are building fit-for-market tools that will digitize informal markets and create value for millions of existing and first-time sellers,” said Awoyemi.
