By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigeria-based digital freight startup, MVX, has announced a $1.3 million seed round to tackle the challenge of financing and booking freight operations in Africa.
Investors in this round included Kepple Africa Ventures, Launch Africa Ventures, Founders Factory and some unnamed angel investors.
The new round is coming after the startup secured a $100,000 pre-seed investment from Oui Capital in 2019 and with the fresh disbursement, MVX wants to ease trade finance and freight shipping in Africa by making the process available online.
According to the Chief Executive Officer, Mr Tonye Membere-Otaji, “We make it easy and convenient for businesses. We handle everything because we have all these service providers in one platform. So, as shippers work with us, MVX works with like seven to ten other service providers.”
Prior to the establishment of the company, Mr Membere-Otaji had worked in the maritime industry but was intrigued by how there was no online marketplace for vessels.
In 2019, Mr Membere-Otaji finally launched the company with CTO Tobi Amusan after securing a $100,000 pre-seed investment from Oui Capital, a pan-African VC firm.
The company was called MVXchange at first and its business model revolved around providing a support vessel booking platform that matched vessel chartering requests made by operators with available Offshore Support Vessels (OSVs).
But in March 2020, the company made a sharp pivot and tweaked its model due to uncertain oil prices and the pandemic.
“We couldn’t see ourselves doing vessel chartering for the long term because the demand for fossil fuels will definitely reduce over the next few decades.
“We wanted to do something scalable, something that was impactful, and something that we could be proud of in the next 20 years,” he added.
This led to the launch of MVXtransit, a digital freight booking platform, helping cargo owners find deals on moving containers across Nigeria.
In April 2021, the company launched MVXpay, a finance and payment solution to provide trade finance for freight operators. However, both offerings are now rolled into one: MVX.
According to the CEO, MVX wants to make freight shipping and trade finance easier for African businesses by bringing booking and deployment processes online.
The startup has expanded beyond Nigeria and claims that merchants from the West African country, as well as Kenya, South Africa, Ghana and Rwanda, can use its platform to move freight in and out of their countries.
MVX charges a commission for the services provided, including trucking, warehousing, shipping, and cargo stuffing.
Modupe Gbadeyanka