Technology

Kenya based B2B e-commerce startup Sokowatch has raised $14 million in Series A funding toward its mission of revamping supply-chain markets for Africainformal retailers.

From Nairobi, the company has created a platform that connects merchants directly to local and multinational suppliers — such as Unilever and Proctor and Gamble — and digitizes orders, payments and delivery-logistics.

Since launching in 2016, and raising a $2 million seed round in 2018, Sokowatch has expanded within Kenya and into Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

With its Series A, the startup plans to broaden its client services — from working-capital to data-analytics — and target new African markets, according to CEO Daniel Yu.

Sokowatch also doesn&t rule out using its infrastructure to someday enter business-to-consumer online retail.

For the moment, the startupprimary business focus is to reduce costs and increase profit margins for small merchants.

&We&re looking to build out the largest B2B e-commerce network across Africa,& Yu told TechCrunch on a call.

Informal retail is still king in Africa — even with the emergence of shopping malls and well-funded e-commerce ventures, such as Jumia.

The size and potential of the continentinformal sector has captured the attentionofeconomists and startups.GDP revisions in several African countries have revealed outdated statistical methods were missing billions of dollars in economic activity. And one estimate by The International Labor Organization places more than two-thirds of Sub-Saharan Africanon-agricultural employment in the informal economy.

On the number of shops in that space, a 2016 study by global consultancy PwC estimated 90% of sales in Africamajor economies come through informal channels, such as markets and kiosks.

By Yuaccount, too many of Africalocal merchants are sacrificing capital and incurring opportunity cost due to inefficient supply-chain.

Sokowatch is shifting that scenario, according to its CEO, and now serves over 15,000 small retailers across its operating areas.

&We…estimate that we save merchants at least 20% on supply-chain costs for the goods we supply,& said Yu.

Sokowatch offers retailers an app to order products from its partner suppliers and maintains a fleet of vehicles, primarily three-wheel tuk tuks, for delivery.

&We handle all of our last-mile logistics exclusively ourselves,& said Yu.

The startup is also generating additional enterprise services. &As part of the product we are developing other tools for merchants to directly manage other aspects of their business, especially when it comes inventory and overall sales,& said Yu.

The data analytics Sokowatch creates for clients is also opening up working-capital solutions.

&We&ve been able to use that data to offer in-kind credit lines to many shops that can&t gain it from banks,& said Yu.

Quona Capital led Sokowatch$14 million Series A round, joined by Amplo, Breyer Capital, Vertex Ventures, Timon Capital and repeat investor 4DX Ventures.

The startup joins other B2B oriented ventures that have drawn significant capital over the last 12 months.

Kenyan startup, and B2B food distributor, Twiga Foods raised $30 million in 2019 and announced it would expand to West Africa.

In August, Nigerian trucking logistics startup Kobo360 raised a $20 million Series A backed by Goldman Sachs. In November, East African on-demand delivery venture Lori Systems hauled in $30 million supported by Chinese investors and another Kenyan logistics company, Sendy, raised $20 million this January backed by Toyota.

Sokowatch wouldn&t name which countries in Sub-Saharan Africa iteyeing for expansion. The companyCEO did confirm the startup could someday use the advantages of its platform to offer 3PL services or sell online directly to consumers in Africa.

&Itwithin the power of our networks to do so& said Yu. &At the end of the day, we want to be the channel — both digital as well as physical — for transforming access to goods and services for these communities.&

WhatsApp is facing a security crisis after it emerged that over 4,000 links inviting people to join private groups have been listed on Google.

Normally, these links are simply sent directly to the person being invited, but if they happen to be posted online anywhere, they can easily be indexed by the search engine so complete strangers can find and

Laiye, a Chinese startup that offers robotic process automation services to several major tech firms in the nation and government agencies, has raised $42 million in a new funding round as it looks to scale its business.

The new financing round, Series C, was co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed China Partners. Cathay Innovation, which led the startupSeries B+ round and Wu Capital, which led the Series B round, also participated in the new round.

China has been the hub for some of the cheapest labor in the world. But in recent years, a number of companies and government agencies have started to improve their efficiency with the help of technology.

Thatwhere Laiye comes into play. Robotic process automation (RPA) allows software to mimic several human behaviors such as keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.

&For instance, a number of banks did not previously offer APIs, so humans had to sign in and fetch the data and then feed it into some other software. Processes like these could be automated by our platform,& said Arvid Wang, co-founder and co-chief executive of Laiye, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The four-and-a-half-year-old startup, which has raised more than $100 million to date, will use the fresh capital to hire talent from across the globe and expand its services. &We believe robotic process automation will achieve its full potential when it combines AI and the best human talent,& he said.

Laiyeannouncement today comes as the market for robotic automation process is still in nascent stage in China. There are a handful of startups looking into this space, but Laiye, which counts Microsoft as an investor, and Sequoia-backed UiPath are the two clear leaders in the market currently.

As my colleague Rita Liao wrote last year, it was only recently that some entrepreneurs and investors in China started to shift their attention from consumer-facing products to business applications.

Globally, RPA has emerged as the fastest growing market in enterprise space. A Gartner report found last year that RPA market grew over 63% in 2018. Recent surveys have shown that most enterprises in China today are also showing interest in enhancing their RPA projects and AI capabilities.

Laiye today has more than 200 partners and more than 200,000 developers have registered to use its multilingual UiBot RPA platform. UiBot enables integration with Laiyenative and third-party AI capabilities such as natural language processing, optical character recognition, computer vision, chatbot and machine learning.

&We are very bullish on China, and the opportunities there are massive,& said Lightspeed partner Amy Wu in an interview. &Laiye is doing phenomenally there, and with this new fundraise, they can look to expand globally,& she said.

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