Sendbox, the Nigerian startup digitising deliveries for e-commerce and social commerce sellers in Africa, has closed a $1.8 million seed round to expand into more African markets, scale its product offerings and hire more talents.
4DX Ventures returned to lead this investment round after participating in the startup’s pre-seed in 2018. Other investors in this round are Enza Capital, FJLabs, Golden Palm Investments and Flexport. YC Combinator also wrote a cheque as part of its 2021 winter cohort. This brings the startup’s total investment to $2 million.
Founded in 2018 by Emotu Balogun (CEO), Sendbox was built to solve the problem of logistics for small and medium businesses by providing them with affordable and reliable courier services to fulfil local and international shipping from pickup to doorstep delivery.
While Balogun was running his previous marketplace startup, Tracklist, the idea was to make it easy for merchants using their platform to handle the fulfilment side of e-commerce themselves but it was difficult. “Fulfilment was a major pain point even for merchants outside our platform, so we decided to focus on developing the idea into a business,” Balogun told TechCabal.
Sendbox services can be accessed through its web application, mobile app available on iOS and Android, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and other e-commerce platforms, and through developer APIs.
This new funding will be used to scale Sendbox’s products and talent pool and, most importantly, bring the company into more African markets. “We are launching in one other West African country first; then either a francophone African country or an East African country next,” Balogun said.
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