Sabi: Sabi is a category agnostic B2B network for informal trade focused on accelerating the velocity of commerce by enabling stakeholders in the informal sector to access and offer value amongst each other.
Approximately 40 million micro, small, and medium firms make up Nigeria’s informal trade sector, which is valued at over $244 billion. Most of these companies functioned in the offline world until a few years ago when entrepreneurs revolutionized the industry by providing infrastructure as well as a wide range of e-commerce and banking services. Sabi, a one-year-old spinoff from Rensource, an African energy company that offers power-as-a-service to users, is the most recent company to raise funds to serve the informal sector. CRE Venture Capital, a pan-African VC fund, led a $6 million bridge deal, which the company revealed to TechCrunch. By delivering power to these small and medium businesses, the Rensource team was able to investigate additional issues that these firms were experiencing and find methods to give value beyond energy.
Sabi is an attempt to platform the informal sector and African trade through a variety of online and offline venues. Sabi, like other well-known B2B e-commerce retail enterprises like Sokowatch, MaxAB TradeDepot, and Twiga, strives to supplement rather than replace the middlemen (primarily distributors) in the B2B e-commerce retail chain.
Sabi’s success is due to the backgrounds of its founders, as well as market need. CEO Adasolum worked at Jumia before joining Sabi and Rensource, where she was in charge of offline sales in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. In the next years, the kind of data they’re getting now in terms of real-time visibility into whether consumers like this or that product will gather and grow tremendously.
