Sky.Garden, a Kenyan mobile-first SaaS company that provides an eCommerce platform for small merchants, has raised a $4 million Series A round to fuel its growth.
The company was formed in 2015 by two Danes, Martin Majlund (the current CEO) and Christian Gruback, and two Kenyans, Isaac Hunja and James Mwai. The prototype was tested in 2016 and the platform formally launched in 2017. In 2018, the company announced a $1.8 million seed round.
Sky.Garden’s A-Round investors tend to support businesses that address real challenges in emerging markets.
For example, the SANAD Fund for MSME is a Luxembourg-based public-private initiative that funds companies supporting job creation in the MSME sector. Its backers, for example, include the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The founders identified a series of gaps in the market preventing small merchants from selling online. These included a lack of last-mile infrastructure, lack of a local payments system, limited data on sales and transactions, limited technical capability and resources for building online stores. and so on.
And they set out to build a platform to fill these gaps with a product suite that includes a free online store.
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