Topship, a shipment company targeted toward African businesses, has recently raised $2.5 million in a seed funding round after concluding the recent Y Combinator’s latest winter batch. The company has secured the investment from Flexport, a California-based freight forwarding company and Y Combinator (YC).
Other backers include Olive Tree Capital, Soma Capital, Capital X, Starling Ventures, and True Capital. Moreover, individual investors who participated in the seed round include Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox, Immad Akhund, and Mercury CEO.
Topship aims to create the easiest way for African business owners to import and export products to their suppliers, customers, and distributors around the world. The company said in a statement that it has a mission to make the shipping process and experience in Africa as stress-free and easy as booking an Uber cab.
The one factor that might work in this journey is Topship’s focus on air cargo whereas other similar players such as Sote, OnePort365, SEND etc., are a mix of ocean, roadways, and air shipment.
According to Moses Enenwali, co-founder and CEO at Topship, the company allows 1,500 merchants to move parcels and cargo from Nigeria to more than 150 countries. Though it can help business of Nigeria to receive parcels from the other way round, they can only take cargo deliveries from China, the United States and the United Kingdom.
He said that the company is till exploring the other streams of revenue such as customer clearance charge and trade financing. It has achieved 50 percent month-on-month income growth since getting into Y combinator since January 2022.
He pointed out that the money raised will provide Topship with deep pockets to start the operations in Ghana, Tanzania and Kenya.
Furthermore, a portion of the funding would help enhance company’s asset-light technology and develop a proprietary global shipping infrastructure to make exports and imports easier and faster.
Source Credit: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/16/nigerian-freight-and-e-commerce-provider-topship-raises-2-5m-from-flexport-and-yc/