Afrigather 80% of Nigeria’s 40 million micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) fail to final past their fifth yr, owing to an absence of digitisation and sub-optimal enterprise practices. 3 graduate college students at Stanford College: Abuzar Royesh, Olamide Oladeji, and Izunna Okonkwo, are attempting to unravel this downside by their startup, Pastel. They’ve simply raised $5.5 million to do this.
Pastel’s $5.5 million seed spherical was raised by pan-African VC agency TLcom Capital with participation from World Founders Capital (GFC), DFS Labs, Ulu Ventures, Plug and Play, Golden Palm Investments, and Soma Cap. This spherical follows a $620,000 pre-seed around the startup raised in 2021.
Pastel describes itself as a enterprise administration resolution supplier. Its founders met in class and realised that all of them had a standard purpose to unravel the ache factors of small companies in rising markets. MSMEs in Nigeria, for instance, are valued at over $200 billion and so the trio targeted on Nigeria’s increasing MSME market. They launched first in Lagos as SabiCash, the place they launched Sabi bookkeeping app, their flagship product.
SabiCash, which was formally rebranded as Pastel, permits small companies to intently monitor transactions, handle prospects, consider money move and deal with debt. By bringing small companies on-line and digitising their practices, Pastel hopes to get rid of the hurdles related to time-consuming and outdated bookkeeping practices. In accordance with Okonkwo, the Sabi bookkeeping app recorded over 100,000 service provider sign-ups by the tip of 2021 and at present has over 45,000 energetic service provider customers.
Pastel’s suite of merchandise embrace Quick Receipt, a easy invoicing and receipt device with over 60,000 present customers, and Pastel Financing, an arm of Pastel that focuses on offering digital monetary options for MSMEs. One in every of such options is the Swift Cash app within the firm’s pipeline. When launched, the Swift Cash app will give attention to digitising the Ajo system, a well-liked conventional financial savings scheme in Nigeria.
Chatting with TechCrunch on why the corporate selected to undertake a multi-app technique somewhat than construct an excellent app as is extra widespread with their rivals, Okonkwo mentioned:
“Our thought course of was to get traction shortly by fixing a service provider’s ache level with a free and straightforward resolution. The following step was to seize worth. So we added worth seize options to the Sabi app that our prospects love. Now we’re constructing much more.
“The best way we’ve considered it’s: versus creating an excellent app that a number of different fintechs have or are in pursuit of, we’re taking a extra platform strategy, that means that any Pastel person can create an account with any of our apps. With the identical login they will entry all the opposite options that we’re offering.”
In an announcement shared with TechCabal, Pastel mentioned that it’s going to use the raised funds to increase its product choices by creating new options and instruments round group financial savings, loans and funds for SMEs in Africa.
