Bamba has recently raised a whopping $3.2 million
Bamba has recently raised a whopping $3.2 million in seed funding to scale its app and expand its team. Bamba is a mobile-based enterprise software founded by Bastian Gotter to aid African micro-merchants in managing their businesses effectively.
Bastian Gotter, a co-founder of the African video-on-demand company, IROKOtv, invested $200,000 into the company. Gotter’s contribution to IROKO was in no small measure, as he was instrumental in raising over $30 million from VCs. He left IROKOtv in 2017, after which he became an angel investor and pursued new projects.
In 2010, he became part of the founding team of Kenyan-based fintech PawaPay, whose API connects up to 25 telecom operators’ mobile money systems and allows merchants from 10 countries to receive and send payments between mobile money accounts.
Gotter is a passive investor and board member in PawaPay. This way, he has been able to explore other opportunities in the mobile money payments space, focusing on providing solutions to small businesses and their owners.
Gotter’s long stay in Kenya made him introduced him to a new world where businesses majorly used manual bookkeeping methods and cash transactions. It made the process of completing business transactions slow, difficult, and almost ineffective. Gotter sought to lift the burden of this method of business operation off the shoulders of Kenyan business owners.
Bamba’s CEO, Bastian Gotter, founded Bamba in 2022 as a mobile application company with the aim of providing business tools for African merchants. The app helps to manage their customers, record stocks, make and receive payments, and access cash advances against their future cash flow. The startup’s focus is to provide an effective workflow and ease of doing business with merchants.
The funding round was led by 468 Capital and other companies like Presight Ventures and Jigsaw VC. A number of high-profile angel investors, Mato Peric, Leonard Stiegler, Laurin Hainy, and Thomas Stafford, also participated in the round. The seed funding round is aimed at gathering more funds to upgrade its software applications and expand across 12 sub-Saharan African countries.
According to PYMNTS, Gotter had said to them in a press release statement:
“We truly believe entrepreneurship is essential to prosperity, so we make running a small business easier by building mobile-first small business software for Africa. This investment allows us to scale the platform, the team and gives us access to insights from our high caliber of investment partners.”
