MergersAfrique, an online platform designed to allow buyers to find potential acquisitions in Africa and smooth the purchasing process, has gone live.
MergersAfrique features a marketplace, allowing users to find, fund, acquire or exit strategic assets, and a live deal room, where people can share and exchange sensitive documents privately and securely. The site also allows users to build a professional network with qualified deal professionals, sponsors and investors.
The platform’s goal is to eliminate the what it feels are inherent inefficiencies in today’s model of connecting buyers and sellers to opportunities, and aims to serve a community with 55 different regulatory bodies and allow companies to consolidate their positions in African markets.
Founder Sean Obedih said the story of MergersAfrique began six years ago when he was introduced to SearchFunds, vehicles created to target and acquire mid-market companies.
“I was very intrigued and it became my obsession. I could see the direct correlation between finding great talented teams of MBA graduates and helping them to acquire great companies that are in need of new blood in their management teams,” he said.
“This seemed like a perfect opportunity, especially for those people that prefer to focus on execution rather than disruption via a startup.”
Obedih went on to launch SFIVentures, and started talking to people in the industry about how they could apply this model to Africa and other emerging markets.
“As we went ahead and started getting traction, it became very clear that the process of acquiring a company in Africa is very difficult, largely due to the fact that most owners don’t want to sell or simply they lack proper bookkeeping practices. We learned that you can’t turn up and ask for audited accounts,” he said.
He said this proved the inspiration for the launch of MergersAfrique, which he said had established great technical partners for its deal rooms to provide customers with peace of mind and control over who sees their documents during the due diligence process.
“Our mission is to power 10-30 per cent of the deals that will done this year and we hope that you can join us on our quest to change the M&A landscape across Africa as we seek to bring transparency and ease of doing business to Africa,” Obedih said.
“We are not naive to think that the whole process of buying a company can be completed online but we believe that the evaluation of the assets can easily be done online as already demonstrated in other markets.”
