Kenyan startups Fuzu and Kyosk are the latest to secure an undisclosed amount of funding from the Jobtech Alliance.
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, most recently Nigeria’s Bumpa and Kenya’s Flowcart, both e-commerce ventures, and Kenyan social commerce startup Twiva.
It has now made two further investments, in Fuzu and Kyosk.
Fuzu has spent more than a decade building talent infrastructure across Africa, and has now pivoted from running a marketplace to managing global teams for AI data operations, evaluation, and QA work. The investment came out of the Jobtech Alliance’s Digital Work Sector Scan, which mapped how AI is reshaping African digital work.
Over the next six months, the alliance will work with Fuzu on direct international client growth, refining the positioning around Fuzu Atlas, and moving up the value chain into higher-quality AI-adjacent work.
“Most African talent platforms still operate as marketplaces, competing on volume and cheaper sourcing. Fuzu has already moved past that. They’ve built the infrastructure layer underneath the marketplace, and Fuzu Atlas is now using it to deliver managed teams that global clients can actually build with. It’s one of the more credible answers we’ve seen to where good digital jobs in Africa come from next,” said Nick Markham, investment lead at the Jobtech Alliance.
The second new portfolio company is Kyosk, a B2B commerce platform that serves over 200,000 informal retailers across Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and Tanzania. Kyosk sits inside the alliance’s microenterprise investment thesis – platforms that operate inside the daily workflow challenges of informal retailers, from inventory access to delivery consistency to repeat purchasing behaviour.
“African B2B commerce is maturing, and the platforms that win from here will be the ones that learn to bridge the fragmented workflows of informal retailers: inventory access, delivery reliability, repeat ordering. Kyosk’s shift from 25 warehouses in Kenya to one per country, with a sharper focus on route-level economics, is exactly the kind of operational discipline this market needs,” said Mide Alonge, senior venture builder at the Jobtech Alliance.