Nigerian Startup Termii Raises $1.4m Seed Funding Round

Termii, a Nigerian communications platform-as-a-service startup that helps African businesses solve the problem of communication with their customers, announced today that it has closed a $1.4 million seed round.

The round was co-led by African early-stage VC firm Future Africa and Japanese but Africa-focused VC Kepple Africa Ventures. Other investors include Acuity Ventures, Aidi Ventures, Assembly Capital, Kairos Angels, Nama Ventures, RallyCap Ventures, and Remapped Ventures. Angel investors like Ham Serunjogi, co-founder and CEO of Chipper Cash; Josh Jones, former co-founder and CTO, Dreamhost; and Tayo Oviosu, co-founder and CEO of Paga also participated.

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Termii was founded in 2014 by Emmanuel Gbolade and Ayomide Awe. The company provides an online messaging platform that provides a multi-channel real-time messaging solution for businesses. The solution aims to increase customer retention for its corporate users and drive more interactive engagement between customers and brands.

Starting off, they offered digital marketing support services to digital and fintech companies. At the time, Termii manually automated their customers’ sales journeys using emails. But noticing how ineffective this was, Gbolade and his team decided to make a slight pivot by building a multichannel communication platform for African companies.

Quite similar to US Internet company, Twilio, Termii uses SMS, email, voice, and instant messaging (IM) channels to verify and communicate with customers in Africa.

The seed investment is coming a year after Termii graduated from the YC, and will be used for expansion and launch more messaging offerings across Africa. With this new fundraising, the company plans to tap into the wealth of experience from some of its new investors like Oviosu and Serunjogi who have also taken local companies into expansion phases.

Emmanuel says the company has its sights on North Africa with a physical presence in Algeria for the expansion. The reason lies behind the fact that in this quarter, Nigeria has accounted for 76% of the company’s messaging transactions, while Algeria currently accounts for 15%.

Termii’s round is quite significant because it strays away from the usual fintech, mobility, agritech, and cleantech sectors that investors typically notice. In fact, there are not so many venture-backed communications platform-as-a-service companies on the continent. A notable example is Kenya’s Africa Talking. It might be a stretch to say we might see more funding activity from this segment but one thing is apparent — investors are willing to place bets on less popular sectors.

Another highlight of Termii’s investment is that while foreign investors continue to dominate rounds in African tech startups, local and Africa-focused firms are beginning to step up by leading some which is a good sign for the bubbling ecosystem.