Nigerian social commerce startup Bumpa has announced a US$4 million round of seed funding to expand its product offering and move into new markets. The new fund will help the startup to execute its mission goal of helping underserved SMEs efficiently manage their business.
The round was led by automation-focused VC, Base10 Partners. It saw 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 (led the last pre-seed round).
Launched in February 2021 by Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele, Bumpa helps merchants move their business online without the need for programming skills. The platform allows them to set up an e-commerce store using their smartphone, accept online and offline payments, manage inventory, handle bookkeeping, fulfill orders, track sales, request dispatch riders, and engage customers.
The startup secured pre-seed funding last September, and has onboarded more than 50,000 merchants and listed more than 400,000 products. Bumpa is now looking to expand its product offerings, embedding more social commerce solutions for the growing number African SMEs in need of digital solutions. These features, integrations, and connections will give SMEs more control over how they manage and scale their business.
Bumpa will also be expanding access to its product to new African markets in the coming months, and expanding its team with a focus on marketing, engineering, and business roles.
“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,” said Umechukwu.
“Bumpa is building a mission that we love and were excited to get behind, enabling e-commerce and reducing friction for millions of SMBs,” said Luci Fonseca, principal at Base10 Partners. “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.”
