Marketforce: Digitizing Africa’s Informal Retailers
Small corner stores are a defining part of emerging market economies. These stores sell everything from groceries to mobile phone data and medicines. In Africa, these retail corner stores are ubiquitous and in 2016 they (and other informal retailers like street hawkers) accounted for approximately 90% of retail sales across Africa. The promise and potential of digitizing these retail stores has attracted some of the sharpest entrepreneurs globally and billions of dollars in venture capital. In Africa, one of the biggest startups in this segment is Kenyan startup MarketForce.
MarketForce is an operating system for end-to-end retail distribution in Africa. It offers a unified B2B ecommerce marketplace to facilitate product sourcing for informal merchants and faster and more efficient distribution for leading consumer brands such as Pepsi, Safaricom, Fort Beverages and others. The company was founded in late 2018 by Tesh Mbaabu and Mesongo Sibuti and is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. It is backed by Y Combinator,, SOSV, V8 Capital Partners and Africa’s Business Heroes.
Since its launch in 2018, Marketforce has managed to:
