Nigeria’s commercial capital is known for the hustle and bustle lifestyle of its inhabitants, especially ‘9 to 5 life’. And to make tasks ranging from cooking to home cleaning less stressful for business professionals, Eden Life is tackling home service needs.
The Nigerian home service provider just completed a seed round of $1.4 million, led by UK-based LocalGlobe capital firm, with participation from Samurai Incubate, Future Africa, Village Global, Rising Tide Africa and Enza Capital.
The new capital raised will be deployed to build out Eden Life’s in-house technology and develop its own world-class kitchens and operations hubs, as it builds a new tech-based platform to improve and grow Africa’s service industry.
“For many of our users, if they are cooking or running errands, they are not being productive. They don’t want distractions from their work, which is where Eden Life comes in,” Nadayar Enegesi, Co-Founder at Eden Life and Co-founder at Andela, said.
Eden Life, Africa’s first home services app for scheduling food, laundry and cleaning services, was launched in 2019 by three former Andelans (previous Andela staff), for busy Lagos professionals who are often time-poor due to long working hours and struggle to source and coordinate dependable, efficient and trustworthy home services providers.
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“We understand this scenario all too well. We are those people – so we basically designed a product with us in mind and realised that collectively, we are a pretty large market in Nigeria and have subsequently scaled Eden with other professionals from all walks of life who need simple tasks done with no fuss,” Enegesi said.
Customers can subscribe to one or three of the services and, according to the company, people try out its food services before picking up additional services.
Before now, Eden used a wide range of third-party service provision in delivering food picked by customers. However, the process became challenging because of low quality on the part of the small service businesses.
A vertical integration strategy, fuelled by the seed funding will ensure Eden can own and manage its entire supply chain and deliver its services without the need for third party providers by having a physical footprint where chefs prepare meals.
Laundry can also be processed quickly and cleaners receive training to provide a high quality service.
Targeted at executives, remote workers, creatives, and tech engineers and developers, Eden Life is removing the barriers to finding reliable household services in the city and in doing so has quickly picked up 600 customers with a 92 percent monthly retention rate and over 70 percent of new users coming via referrals.
“While we can’t create more time physically, we are offering access to a platform that delivers a seamless mix of household services, so that busy professionals can focus on their work and leisure. Our platform has been improved to offer some of the highest quality services underpinned by world-class technology and a highly trained team of professionals,” Enegesi said.
Eden Life’s proprietary technology platform, which is an app, allows its users to continually give feedback on all aspects of service. It uses data to compile preferences and offer suggestions based on user feedback.
“We fell in love with Eden Life’s vision for the future of home services in Africa. A true customer obsession sits at the heart of everything they are building – this is already visible in customer retention and other key metrics,” Remus Brett, General Partner at LocalGlobe said.
Since launching, Eden Life has delivered over 60,000 services in Lagos, and plans to revolutionise the home services market by making life easier for the chronically time-poor tech-native professionals and executives.
