Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
Senegalese technology company, ProXalys, has raised $500,000 to invest massively in digital resources following its transition from serving small-scale agricultural producers and retailers to software.
Lead investors of the raise include 216 Capital Ventures, Haske Ventures, and Digital Africa.
With its new injection, the Senegalese company is setting its sights on investing massively in talents that cover technology, data, and artificial intelligence (AI).
It also looking to use the recent fund-raising to expand its ranks and conquer the Ivorian market.
At first, ProXalys developed a digital solution that identifies available agricultural products and organizes last-mile delivery, without intermediaries.
Over time, the company’s positioning moved away from logistics and towards software. The application took on new functionalities. Shopkeepers could not only organize their supplies but also request deferred payment, keep accounts, and assess their level of profitability.
Called ProBoutik, the application is above all a valuable tool for financial inclusion. It records and analyzes the merchant’s cash flow and then calculates their level of financial solvency by assigning a score. The shopkeeper can then use this data to approach microfinance institutions to obtain credit more easily.
This is increasingly appealing to the informal sector, which has begun to modernize. ProBoutik now brings together nearly 8,000 merchants. By the end of the year, the tool is aiming to have 100,000 users.
For the start-up, this decisive step towards internationalization required months of preparation, including work with the Senegal Tech project run by the Netherlands Trust Fund V (NTF V) at the International Trade Centre (ITC).
The NTF V programme (July 2021 – June 2025) is based on a partnership between the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the International Trade Centre. ts ambition is to contribute to an inclusive and sustainable transformation of agri-food systems partly through digital solutions, to improve the international competitiveness of local tech start-ups particularly in Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Senegal and Uganda.
ProXalys is also one of 16 fintech start-ups in French-speaking Africa to have benefited from Digital Africa’s Fuzé investment scheme.
