By Adedapo Adesanya
Bumpa has raised $4 million in seed funding to build the future of commerce for African sellers and boost retail automation with payments, socials, logistics, credit, and analytics that will spur the growth of small businesses.
The round was led by Base10 Partners, the largest black-led fund in the world, with participation from Plug & Play Ventures (through their commerce fund) and SHL Capital (Sahil Lavingia, CEO of Gumroad).
Others included Magic Fund, Jedar Capital, DFS Labs, FirstCheck Africa Angel Program, E62 Ventures, Club14, and Fast Forward Ventures.
With over 42 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria today, the day-to-day operations of a small business owner are still riddled with a lot of manual & offline processes, mistrust, lack of records, and inefficiencies.
Bumpa wants to build the infrastructure to power digital commerce, enabling African small business owners to start, manage and grow their businesses from their mobile devices.
It wants to help small businesses to launch their business online with a website they can manage on their mobile device, manage their inventory, and engage their customers.
Also, it allows them to keep online records of their inventory, sales and customers and get detailed analytics of their business across all the channels they sell.
Speaking on this, Mr Kelvin Umechukwu, the chief executive officer of Bumpa, said the startup had supported customers to record over 200,000 orders and trade a gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $20 million.
He added, “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 August, Bumpa released an integration with Meta, which will allow businesses that sell on Instagram to 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.
Modupe Gbadeyanka 
Dipo Olowookere