Nigerian e-commerce Platform, Omnibiz Secures $15 million pre-Series A Investment To Boost Operation
Omnibiz, a Nigerian B2B e-commerce company, has secured a $15 million pre-Series A investment led by Timon Capital to boost its operation in Nigeria and other African countries.
The raise is structured as a $5M equity and $10M debt investment deal and saw participation from Ventures Platform, Lofty Inc, Chapel Hill Denham, Chandaria Capital, and Musha Ventures.
Present in over 12 cities in Ghana and Nigeria, Omnibiz provides retailers with a fully integrated digital platform. Retailers can purchase and restock conveniently from over 200 product brands, such as Coca-Cola and Nestle, through the Omnibiz app.
The fund was raised to begin further regional expansion, starting this month. Rustagi said the company wants to expand to second-tier cities in Nigeria like Ilorin, Asaba, and Akure, where retail is growing. He added that there is no support in these cities and so, they see huge potential there. Omnibiz wants to become the primary B2B operating system for informal retailers in these cities by helping with last-mile delivery, procurement, working capital, inventory management, and operational tools for tracking sales, cost, prices, and profit.
Deepankar Rustagi, CEO and co-founder of Omnibiz, said that the funding came about because existing investors motivated the company to raise a pre-Series A.
In a statement shared with an online platform, Nikos Katsaounis, a partner at Timon Capital, said concerning the raise, “We invested in Omnibiz because we believe that it is solving a much-needed problem. The FMCG supply chain is fragmented, inefficient, and opaque. Omnibiz tackles all these problems and addresses them with an efficient software layer that provides much-needed data on this otherwise obscure market and supply chain.”
Omnibiz allows retailers to access credit, buy-now-pay-later options, and other financial services, which was launched in November last year. Rustagi said that they added the buy-now-pay-later feature because retailers on the company’s platform often went out of stock because of a lack of capital to grow their inventory size or volume.
With MyStore, a bookkeeping solution for retailers to manage their customers and inventory, retailers can move forward faster and open multiple stores easily. The company projects that retailers on its platform will see a 4 times increase in their revenue with this added support. He added that building this system has helped the company achieve the retention of 65,000 retailers and an average retailer monthly sales of $250.