Announcing Bumpa's $4M Seed Round: CEO's Note

Nigeria is home to over 40 million of these small and medium enterprises (SMEs) today, but the day-to-day of a small business owner is still riddled with a lot of manual & offline processes, mistrust, lack of records, and inefficiencies.

Big businesses have the resources to pay for expensive tools and hire a lot of staff to help them drive growth and marketing, collect and analyze data for better decision-making, use their records to access credit, and optimize or automate their processes to save time and money.

All these have not been available to small business owners for years now, most of them are a one-person team trying to figure out the chaos day-to-day by themselves and with little or no resources. 

Bumpa exists for small business owners.

We are building the infrastructure to power digital commerce; enabling African small business owners to start, manage and grow their businesses from their mobile devices.

Bumpa exists to give superpowers to small business owners; helping them launch their business online with a website they can manage on their mobile device, manage their inventory, engage their customers, keep online records of their inventory, sales and customers, and get detailed analytics of their business across all the channels they sell.

With millions of Africans coming online yearly, there is a huge opportunity for us to empower small business owners with tools to digitize and grow their businesses online. 

This is why we are excited to announce that we have raised $4 million in seed funding to build the future of commerce for African sellers.

This round was led by Base10 Partners, the largest black-led fund in the world, with participation from Plug & Play Ventures (through their commerce fund), SHL Capital (Sahil Lavingia, CEO of Gumroad), Magic Fund, Jedar Capital, DFS Labs, FirstCheck Africa Angel Program, E62 Ventures, Club14, and Fast Forward Ventures. 

Bumpa 1.0: The Journey that led us here

When we started Bumpa, we knew that it was going to be challenging but having loyal customers that make your product a part of their day-to-day lives is all the motivation needed to continue to innovate and show up every day.

Just recently, we celebrated Diusor, the founder & CEO of The Ajala Store & Gameplug for crossing 10,000 orders on Bumpa. Diusor’s story, like other business owners on Bumpa, is a story of grit, hard work, and determination.

She started using Bumpa when we were in beta when she was getting an average of 15 orders per week; we have been with her till today as she records over 200 orders weekly.

This is no small feat that she has achieved, and we have been privileged to be a part of that journey. 

I received an Instagram post recently from Tilly, the founder & CEO of ReshapeMe, describing Bumpa as her business bestie. ReshapeMe was using an online form to collect customer information and their orders before she heard about Bumpa.

She had problems reconciling payments with orders, having a central place for her customers' information, and a seamless way to run online sales with little effort.

She has been with us since then, as we provided her with a seamless way to own & manage her website, power all her online sales, collect her customer information, and support her in building her own community for women. 

Bumpa is trusted by over 50,000 small business owners today, from people who have been running their businesses for years, to some who are just starting out and are seeking the easiest way to start, to students that are looking for ways to earn an extra income and to those who need a support system.

We are building a brand that stays close to our customers, that supports our customers, and are excited about the growth of our customers. We have supported our customers to record over 200,000 orders and trade a gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $20 million, and we think they are just getting started. 

We are constantly listening and learning from our customers through our community, using the knowledge to improve the product.

In August, we released our integration with Meta, which greatly improves how businesses that sell on Instagram, collect payments, store their buyer’s information, support the buyer through their buying decision, request payments, and share invoices/receipts all from the Bumpa app and without the buyer needing to leave Instagram.

We started working on this because the data suggested that 40% of all orders on Bumpa are from social media, and it took us a few months, but the effort, hard work, and meetings with the Meta Messaging team paid off when we saw how our customers are using this feature. 

Bumpa 2.0: Our Next Stage of Growth

Our mission is super clear; to become the easiest way for small business owners to start, manage and grow their businesses.

In the past few months, we have introduced a set of innovations into the commerce space, including our introduction to social commerce with our integration with Instagram, a better way to run online sales with discounts & coupons, business reports across all sales channels, and many others.

All of these were made possible with a small team of 18 amazing people. 

As a Bumpa merchant, you should expect to see a lot more connections to other channels and services you use on a day-to-day basis.

We will continue to abstract the complexities and reduce the fragmentation to achieve higher standards of retail automation on the continent; with payments, socials, logistics, credit, analytics, etc; providing you with innovative ways to manage and grow your business.

We will also be investing in hiring more talented people to join the team, people that will be dedicated to your business growth and will do all they can to see you succeed, through building products, sealing partnerships, providing you with 24/7 support, and figuring out ways to grow your businesses (if you are one of these people, we have open roles, kindly check out our career page). 

In summary, our plan is to partner with you as you start and grow your business, supporting you every step of the way as your business best friend. 

Thank you 

Thank you to our amazing team, who show up daily, solving difficult problems with passion and creativity. Thank you to our existing investors, who first believed in us, and for their unwavering support through our journey. Thank you to our supporters, who have always cheered and supported us.

Thank you to our loyal customers, who have entrusted us with their businesses. We love and appreciate you and will always continue rooting for you. 

Welcome to our new investors, who believe in our mission to unlock prosperity for millions of small businesses across emerging markets in the digital economy. This is day 1. 

Kelvin Umechukwu,

CEO,

Bumpa.