Yobante Express, a Senegalese logistics startup, has raised a US$1.2 million bridge funding seed round to help it spread across South Africa and Nigeria, as it looks to build on its impressive growth.
The funding round was led by Grenfell Holdings, Libertad (through its investment branch, Aguila Investments), R-Ventures, Launch Africa Ventures, and a pool of local and high international angel investors.
The last-mile delivery digital platform closed the investment just before the Series A round which it plans to raise later this year to scale into countries surrounding all its existing locations. of packages
“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,” said, Oumar Basse, Co-founder & CEO.
Yobante Express had taken part in the Startupbootcamp AfriTech accelerator program in Cape Town in 2019 and is now active in 5 African markets outside of Senegal – Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
Yobante Express has an annual run rate of 1.2 million parcels carried and US$8 million in revenues.
“We plan to carry 2 million parcels in 2021,” Basse said.
“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,” he concluded.
Yobante Express was founded in November 2018, and it is a web and mobile platform that links local couriers, within a resilient mesh network of relay points, with local commerce to deliver packages from point to point until the last mile.
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