Senegal’s Yobante Express Secures A $1.2 Million Bridge Round To Improve Its Growth
Sept. 29, 2021, 1:53 p.m.
Yobante Express, a Senegalese delivery startup that runs an online marketplace connecting local couriers with local commerce for optimizing domestic, cross-border, and last-mile deliveries has raised a $1.2 million bridge round to scale up its services.
The $1.2 million bridge round was led by Grenfell Holdings, Launch Africa Ventures, R-Ventures, Libertad Ventures, and its investment branches Aguila Investments and other pools of local and high international angel investors. The funds will help the company achieve critical mass in Nigeria and South Africa.
Founded in November 2018, Yobante Express is a web and mobile platform that uses gig economy, independent and casual couriers within a resilient mesh network of relay points to deliver packages from point to point until the last mile, twice as fast and 40 percent more affordable than existing solutions.
Oumar Basse the CEO, said, “We plan to carry 2 million parcels in 2021. This bridge round is to fund rollout in South Africa and Nigeria, including building operations, developing the network of relay points and carriers, and acquiring customers.”
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Yobante Express plans to raise a Series A later this year and it will be used to scale into countries surrounding all its existing locations.
“Within six months, we should be able to connect Lagos to Dakar using Yobante for the entire journey. Within three years, we should be able to send a parcel from Cape Town to Dakar,” Basse said.
Last year, Yobante participated in the 2019 Startupbootcamp AfriTech accelerator program in Cape Town. This startup today is now active across five African markets namely Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, and Zimbabwe.
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