Africa is booming. The continent is projected to have the fastest urban growth rate in the world, with Africa’s cities set to be home to an additional 950 million people by 2050. Whilst today’s Africa is largely rural, the majority of this growth is happening in small and medium-sized cities and the Africa of tomorrow will see more than half of the population residing in cities by 2037. African cities have been critical drivers of economic growth and account for more than two-thirds of global economic output in most countries.

With urbanisation comes great opportunities to invest in infrastructure, tackle inequality and increase access to essential services to improve quality of life. However, the growing city populations also pose significant challenges. The changes call for greater urban planning and construction to support population growth, with more investment in creating housing, roads and larger commercial centres. Naturally, the demand for construction projects has skyrocketed — and with it, the important need to organise the largely opaque, offline and frictitious African construction industry.

Construction is crucial to major African economies, with core materials like steel, stone, and cement making up 70% of costs. But, small retailers struggle with slow deliveries and longer cash conversion cycles due to issues with securing quotes and negotiating with wholesale suppliers. This hinders growth, creating an opportunity for a vertically integrated supply chain solution to enhance efficiency and profitability.

Jumba is doing exactly that, providing a technology-enabled experience for construction material buyers in the industry, tackling issues such as the lack of transparent pricing, unreliable quality, fragmented vendor base, and inefficient logistics. For wholesale suppliers, Jumba provides visibility into market volumes and makes it easier for them to provide more products to retailers. Adopting Jumba’s technology can have a substantial effect on these businesses, particularly as more tools are added to the platform in the future.

Tackling these great challenges requires a great team, and Jumba is not short of this. The company boasts an incredibly talented founding team:

Kagure Wamunyu
CEO and Co-founder of Jumba, previously former country manager at Uber Kenya, the Global Head of Operations at Kobo360 where she led the companies expansion into several markets, and a Senior Director of Strategy at Bridge International Academies. Kagure continually demonstrates a deep understanding of the bureaucracies and issues facing small businesses within the construction industry at the local and structural levels and has proven to be adept at leveraging both her professional experience and deep desire to transform Africa in developing Jumba.

Miano Nkoja
CTO and Co-founder, previously held a number of leadership and technical roles at Google over the course of seven years, alongside his experience as a software engineer at the United Nations. Miano combines technical competency with an understanding of the local nuances at play in this arena to support the transformative technology underpinning Jumba’s success.

Peace Osangir
CFO, has over 10 years experience as a finance director, with leadership experience at American Express and as COO of African fintech, KopaKopa, bringing experience in credit, BNPL, and SME finance.

Over the past few months, the more time I spent with Kagure, Miano and the team at Jumba, the more we invariably talked about all of the issues the construction industry faces across the continent. During this time, I have been impressed with the team’s focus on execution as well as their customer obsession. What they’re building today will help shape the future of construction forever.

Looking ahead, Jumba has already set sights on addressing the cash flow issues within the sector, with plans to launch an embedded credit solution, leveraging local bank partners. Transforming a rapidly growing industry by digitising what has been a primarily analogue way of operating is exciting, but being able to deepen the financial capability of the suppliers and buyers by embedding financial solutions they need to run their business efficiently will be profoundly impactful.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we are partnering with the incredible team behind Jumba on their journey to transform the construction industry across Africa. This marks our 12th investment in Africa and expands our bench of companies transforming the construction industry, including Compa, Alcemy, Concretene and nPlan.

We are incredibly excited to lead the Seed round alongside a phenomenal group of new and existing investors, including Foundamental, Enza Capital, Future Africa, SeedStars, SpeedInvest, Alumni Angels and others.