Vendease Gets $3.2 Million To Help Hotels, Restaurants Buy Food Supplies In Africa

An online marketplace that allows restaurants and other food businesses to buy supplies straight from manufacturers and farms, Vendease has raised a seed round of $3.2 million.

The startup company was founded in January 2020 and took part in Y Combinator’s winter batch that included nine other African startups.

Individual local investors and early backers such as Paga CEO Tayo Oviosu, Remita CEO John Obaro and Magic Fund. Y Combinator, Hustle Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures, Hack VC and Soma Capital participated, including San Francisco-based venture capital firm Global Founders Capital who led the seed round.

Starting from Nigeria, Vendease aim is to solve the challenges and inefficiencies in Africa’s highest fragmented food sector. Initially, the company found a sweet spot in a purely decentralized marketplace play connecting suppliers and farms on one side with restaurants and food businesses on another.

The system is designed to generate all the possible suppliers that can fulfill the need for a food supply t when a restaurant or food business places an order. The system compares the price and quality of a food supplies and assigns the order to the supplier. According to the company, delivery is made within 24 hours, either by itself or third-party logistics providers.

Co-founder and CEO Tunde Kara stated that the company’s efforts to bring in quality and operational help led to Vendease building a series of stacks — logistics, storage, payments, inventory management, embedded finance — to control the movement of food supplies from one point of production to the endpoint of consumption.