Kenya’s Bamba, a mobile-first enterprise software startup targeting small and micro-businesses in Africa, has raised $3.2 million in seed financing. The funding round was led by venture capital firm 468 Capital and saw the participation of other investors such as Presight Ventures, Jigsaw VC, and high-profile angels Mato Peric, Leonard Stiegeler, Laurin Hainy, and Thomas Stafford. The company plans to use the funds to scale its operations, build out its engineering team and its mobile offering and increase its user base to include people businesses across 12 sub-Saharan regions with high mobile money penetration.
Bamba was founded in 2022 by Bastian Gotter. The founder is a serial investor and entrepreneur known to have made a handful of investments in businesses and startups across Africa including Nigeria’s IROKO TV which he co-founded, PawaPay, etc.
“We truly believe entrepreneurship is essential to prosperity, so we make running a small business easier by building mobile-first small business software for Africa. This investment allows us to scale the platform, and the team and gives us access to insights from our high caliber of investment partners,” Bamba’s Founder & CEO Bastian Gotter said.
The idea for Bamba came after its founder noticed that businesses relied heavily on manual bookkeeping and didn’t have software to record their cash and mobile money transactions. To combat this challenge, Bamba was born. “They also recorded stock components and had some form of customer relationship management on WhatsApp. It wasn’t a coherent picture and was just a big mess. And that’s where we ultimately saw an opportunity to launch Bamba,” he said.
Bambo provides simple tools via its platform for merchants to manage their customers, record stocks, receive payments, make payments, and access cash advances against their future cash flow.
Commenting on the funding round and the startup, Ludwig Ensthaler, a partner at lead investor 468 Capital said that “We are thrilled to invest and support the team and vision at Bamba. We feel that the investment opportunities in “enterprise” software focused on small businesses in Africa are significant and remain largely untapped. We believe that Bamba is well placed with a great product and a solid founder to build a category-defining company.”
“Bamba sits at the intersection between cash and mobile money, between payments and credit. We believe there is a significant opportunity in this space and are keen to explore it with Bastian” Dan Jones, Partner at Jigsaw VC added.
Fabian Hansen of Presight Ventures also added that “We appreciate entrepreneurs that build novel solutions that push boundaries and are thrilled to support Bamba’s potential impact across the small businesses ecosystem in Africa.”
