Kenyan e-commerce Startup Sky.Garden raises USD 1.2 Mn
Kenya based e-commerce start-up, Sky.Garden, has raised USD 1.2 Mn from Dutch and Norwegian firms to grow its business.
Sky.Garden is a SaaS ecommerce platform built for retailers in Africa. It gives control to the individual retailer by allowing inventory control and immediate payment reconciliation in an automated platform, where local shipping and payment options come out-of-the-box and customer care is handled by the Sky.Garden machine learning framework.
Launched last year, it has received funding from Jesper Drescher associated with online shopping platform BeautyClick, TRK Group based in Norway, The Katapult Accelerator Follow-up Fund, and a syndicate of Danish Business Angels led by Futuristic.vc.
The online sales portal claims to have registered more than 3000 web shop owners and a listing of over 23,000 products from small and large business owners across the country. Sellers are charged a flat rate of eight per cent per transaction to use the platform.
Kenya’s e-commerce sector currently dominated by Jumia, is getting flooded by new entrants like Safaricom and Sky.Garden. These players are expected to face stiff competition from each other leading to price wars. Recently there was news of Nasper’s backed OLX shutting its physical offices in Nigeria and Kenya, although their marketplace operations were to run normally.
