Ghanaian startup KudiGo, a tech platform for the informal consumer retail industry, is planning on expanding to three new markets this year after seeing impressive uptake at home and in Nigeria.
Launched eight months ago, KudiGo provides an integrated, mobile-based retail, payments, accounting and analytics engine for the consumer retail industry.
“Our solution enables convenience stores, provision stores, pharmacies and a host of other micro-SME retailers to leverage on software in understanding and expanding their business,” Kingsley Abrokwah, “chief enabler” at KudiGo, told Disrupt Africa.
As much as 90 per cent of the consumer retail space in Sub-Saharan Africa is made up of micro-SMEs, yet less than 15 per cent of such businesses can afford an efficient and reliable retail system. They often also lack the technical know-how to keep proper books, excluding them from the formal financial system.
KudiGo feels it has come up with solution to this problem, in a way better than its competitors.
“Retail tech has failed to properly address the problems facing retailers, distributors and manufacturers in Africa, with overpriced tech solutions, sophisticated design, inability to easily integrate with essential services like accounting and payments, and overall lack of meaningful data analytics to enable these business have oversight and become financially inclusive,” Abrokwah said.
KudiGo, however, is easy to use and integrated with legacy financial systems, and the startup has secured some key partnerships. One with Sage Pastel means it is listed on the Sage Marketplace as an add-on for all Sage products, while it also has a deal with Interswitch to deploy its solution into Interswitch’s payment engine. Accenture is leveraging on its data for research.
In eight months, the startup – which is currently raising its seed round – has already expanded beyond Ghana into Nigeria, and has over 300 businesses using its solution. It plans to expand into Kenya, Rwanda and Sierra Leone by the end of the year.
“We have seen over 300,000 inventories uploaded onto our system, with over 4,000 orders processed so far,” Abrokwah said.
KudiGo has two revenue models.
“One is targeted at the retailers who use our solution, and is a monthly subscription of US$13.99, but we have a free version for them as well with limited features,” said Abrokwah.
“We also have an enterprise model for manufacturers and distributors in the retail space – they leverage on our data for oversight and analytics, and we charge them a subscription fee based on the services they want to use. We just rolled out our first revenue model two months ago, and we are averaging US$6,000 in monthly revenue from less than 15 per cent of our user base.”
