Nigeria’s Bumpa and Kenya’s Flowcart, both e-commerce ventures, have raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Jobtech Alliance after it conducted a landscape scan on digital services for microenterprises across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Disrupt Africa reported in October 2022 on the launch of the Jobtech Alliance, an ecosystem-building initiative around inclusive jobtech in Africa steered by Mercy Corps and BFA Global, which aims to create an enabling environment for entrepreneurs to build platforms that deliver quality livelihoods, are inclusive, and enable users to engage in decent work.
It has run several cohorts, but is now also making direct investments in relevant ventures. Its investments in Nigeria’s Bumpa and Kenya’s Flowcart come after its research on digital services for microenterprises found that for the 80 per cent of Africans whose livelihoods run through MSMEs, the constraint is not customers, but operations. “African commerce runs on conversation, informal trust and fragmented logistics, not checkout flows. Our investment thesis is that platforms built to introduce structure beneath that existing behaviour, rather than replace it with new marketplaces, are the ones that will scale, improve merchant incomes and unlock financial inclusion. Flowcart does this at the supply and distribution layer; Bumpa does it at the point of sale,” Jobtech Alliance said.
Flowcart is an AI-powered conversational commerce and CRM platform built on WhatsApp, while Bumpa simplifies business operations with tools that make inventory, sales, orders and customer management easy.