Bumpa, a social commerce startup based in Lagos Nigeria, has raised $4 million in its seed funding round.
The fundraising round had leading participations from Base10 Partners. Further participations came from investment firms including Plug & Play Ventures commerce fund, SHL Capital, Jedar Capital, Magic Fund, DFS Lab, FirstCheck Africa Angel Programme, E62 Ventures, Club14, and Fast Forward Ventures.
The startup said it would use the newly raised funds to expand its product offerings, and also embed more social commerce solutions for the increasing number of African small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in need of digital solutions.
In addition to product expansion, Bumpa is also aiming at upscaling its team, focusing on Marketing, Engineering, and Business roles as it prepares to help more merchants achieve business success.
“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,” CEO Kelvin Umechukwu, said.
Bumpa, which was formerly known as SalesCabal, was founded in 2021 by the duo of Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele. Both co-founders started by designing website for small businesses that intends to have online presence, and later evolved to a creating a Shopify-style website template that users can use with little assistance.
Bumpa later evolved into providing businesses with a platform that allows them to set up an e-commerce marketplace using their smartphone; accept online and offline payments, manage inventory, handle bookkeeping, fulfill orders, track sales, request dispatch riders, and engage customers.
“We’re trying to solve the inefficiencies small businesses face as most of them have operated in a black hole for the longest time. They don’t have enough data and insights into what’s happening, what’s being sold and how their products are being sold. While many startups are trying to solve this, we’re doing it differently. We’re evolving, and we consider our features as the foundation of what is possible with Bumpa,” Umechukwu said.
“I think the ideology and the product direction between Bumpa and other companies differ. Most of them have fintech elements; we are not trying to be fintech — we’re in the retail automation space. We’re not trying to solve things in fintech that have already been solved. There are new things that have not been tested before, like the Meta integration,” Umechukwu added.
Read also: Egypt’s MaxAB raises $40 million in its pre-series B funding round
Speaking on the fundraise, Luci Fonseca, principal officer at Base10 Partners said:
“Bumpa is building a mission that we love and were excited to get behind, enabling e-commerce and reducing friction for millions of SMBs. 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.”