Bumpa, a Nigerian social commerce startup, has disclosed a $4 million seed funding round led by Base10 Partners with participation from Plug & Play Ventures commerce fund, SHL Capital, Jedar Capital, Magic Fund, DFS Lab, FirstCheck Africa Angel Programme, E62 Ventures, Club14, and Fast Forward Ventures.

The funding will be used to expand its product offering and move into new markets across the continent.

Bumpa was launched in February 2021 by Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele. The startup aids merchants move their business online without the need for programming skills. The platform allows them to set up an e-commerce store using their smartphone, accept online and offline payments, manage inventory, handle bookkeeping, fulfil orders, track sales, request dispatch riders, and engage customers.

This update is also coming on the heels of the startup's pre-seed funding in September 2021, where Bumpa onboarded more than 50,000 merchants and listed more than 400,000 products on its platform. Following this seed funding, the startup is now taking up on expansion plans for its product offerings and embedding more social commerce solutions for the growing number of African SMEs in need of digital solutions. According to the startup, these features, integrations, and connections will give SMEs more control over how they manage and scale their business. 

In the coming months, Bumpa will also expand product availability to new African markets and grow its team with a focus on marketing, engineering, and business roles.

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“The goal is to do three things: connect, innovate, and scale. Bumpa 2.0 for us as a startup is to connect all the relevant tools, channels, and places that SMEs need all in one place – the Bumpa app. It is also to innovate by bringing simpler, automated ways to do any business transaction or operation on the app. It is also to scale our users' businesses, our position as key players in the African commerce industry, and to scale the capacities and reach of the employees and even we, the founders,” said Umechukwu.

“Bumpa is building a mission that we love and were excited to get behind, enabling e-commerce and reducing friction for millions of SMBs,” said Luci Fonseca, principal at Base10 Partners. “The more we spent time with Kelvin and Teejay, the more we saw that they are very special founders and have a powerful mission to build the defining e-commerce platform in Nigeria and across Africa.”