Ghanaian startup Swoove is building a cloud-based operating system that allows logistics companies – big and small – to digitise and scale their operations.
Swoove connects businesses with network logistics services to enable them to reach customers across the continent, with the startup aiming to create technology to standardise and democratise logistics services for all businesses at the most affordable price.
The team started working together straight out of university in 2018. Its original product, Curiashops, was a website-builder platform that aimed to help any small business set up a free website within five minutes, with just a phone number.
“After a year of working on it, we realised that a major problem for our customers was delivery – it was expensive and not easily accessible, making the platform incredibly difficult to grow. Just like how e-commerce sites require payments, we realised the e-commerce sector also needs logistics – a seamless ease of access to affordable delivery, which was missing from the market,” said Kwaku Tabiri, Swoove’s CEO.
“Moreover, in the wake of the pandemic, the e-commerce space became increasingly competitive, propagating the need for logistics. More people fled to online commerce and that’s when we saw the opportunity. Nobody was solving the delivery problem.”
The new Swoove enables users to access a suite of technology that helps them to automate their processes, improve customer experiences, generate business intelligence, access financial services and credit, and access a network of logistics services to access demand.
“Our goal is to bridge the gap between local logistics services in emerging markets and international high tech competitors like Uber and DHL by democratising modern logistics tech on our digital SaaS platform,” said Tabiri.
After connecting more than 20,000 SMEs to hundreds of logistics companies, the Swoove team realised a growing trend – 90 per cent of logistics companies were failing within their first two years.
“The reason for their failure was clear and obvious to us in the data. These companies had extremely underutilised assets. More than 40 per cent of these companies had assets were either partly or completely idle. There was also had extremely high rate of churn amongst their drivers,” said Tabiri.
“Worst of all, they also really bad or negative margins, because they did not properly track their expenses versus their income, and all it took was one uncontrolled external risk to completely put them out of business.”
Swoove sets out to address these issues. Tabiri said the pitch it makes to its customers is simple and practical.
“Make more money through our network; save money through automation; find and motivate your drivers: and access credit,” he said.
Having successfully raised a pre-seed round of funding at the end of last year, and been selected to take part in the ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator programme, Swoove is now raising a seed round of US$1 million to help it scale further.
“We’ve made tremendous progress – we’ve continuously onboarded customers since our launch last year and we’ve grown volumes 10x,” Tabiri said.
“We are currently working in Ghana, Kenya. South Africa and Gambia, and our goal over the next two years is to expand to eight markets across Africa, South America and South Asia.”
