The business climate in the food and beverage sector in Nigeria and throughout Africa has received a boost as Vendease secured $30 million in an equity and debt Series A funding round to consolidate its growth and operations in Nigeria and Ghana and to support its expansion across the continent.
According to the Y Combinator-backed digital platform which helped it get a $3.2 million seed round last October, the $20 million equity round was co-led by a rare joint investment between TLcom and Partech. The $10 million debt round was raised from the local finance market.
Commenting on the funding, Tunde Kara, CEO, and co-founder of Vendease said, “our mission is to enable the efficient flow of food across the continent, from point of production to point of consumption. It is more than just placing orders for supplies, we want to transform how the entire sector works and remove the bottlenecks that stunt the growth of restaurants and food businesses. With greater efficiency in the supply chain, we believe we can unlock more growth opportunities across board, which is why we are excited to have raised this round, led by two of Africa’s biggest VCs, who understand what it takes to power such an ambitious mission,”
The equity round also included VentureSouq, Hustle fund, Hack VC, GFR Fund, Kube VC, Magic Fund, and Kairos Angels, who re-invested after participating in the previous round.
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The press statement further informs that the new funding will support the delivery of these services to more restaurants and food businesses across Africa, as well as the development of new solutions and services to drive growth across the food value chain.
Andreata Muforo, Partner at TLcom, said, “Restaurants and food businesses play a vital role in communities across the continent and Vendease is on a mission to bring affordability, convenience, and reliability to these businesses and builds a platform that allows the wider food sector to optimise their operations,”
“Vendease is delivering vital solutions that impact critical issues around the food system in Africa,” said Cyril Collon, General Partner at Partech. “We see huge scope for growth in Nigeria and beyond and we are very optimistic about what can be achieved,” he added.
Following their investments, Muforo and Cyril Collon will join Vendease’s board as new directors.
As reported in the press statement, Africa’s restaurants and food businesses lose $100 billion annually due to expensive and unreliable supply, limited access to data to inform procurement decisions, wastage and theft, as well as limited access to capital to fund procurement.
Despite ongoing inflation and global shortage in food supply, Vendease’s solutions have delivered significant savings for its users and provided relative stability for their stock levels.
Over the last 12 months, Vendease has moved more than 400,000 metric tonnes of food through its platform, helping its users save more than $2,000,000 in procurement costs and more than 10,000 procurement man-hours.
Its data has also helped them reduce wastage from overstocking by an additional $485,000. Users have also accessed more than $12 million worth of inventory via its embedded finance product.
