Kenya’s Taz Technologies Gets More Support For MPost With USD 1.9 Mn Series-A Round
Kenya’s Taz Technologies — the company that is perhaps best known for creating and patenting the technology product known as MPost — has raised a USD 1.9 Mn Series A round.
This is coming after the startup raised an undisclosed amount of Pre-Series A funding in June this year from HAVAIC; the Cape Town-based VC firm.
The latest funding round drew participation from both existing and new investors from South Africa, Australia, Japan, the United States, Canada, and Nigeria, with blue-chip VC funds, high-net-worth individuals, and institutions, among the most recent investors.
Taz Technologies built and patented MPost; the technology that enables users to transform their phone into a unique mobile postal address and mobile postal box.
MPost enables users sign up for virtual postal addresses using their mobile phone numbers. It promises a convenient, reliable and affordable way of sending and receiving packages, as well as providing last-mile connectivity, through post offices worldwide.
The raise comes just weeks after Kenya’s largest telco, Safaricom, linked up with the Postal Corporation of Kenya to launch a partnership with MPost.
This partnership is expected to give the 33 million subscribers of Safaricom the ability to register for an MPost address via USSD.
Taz Technologies was founded in 2015 by Abdulaziz Omar and Twahir Mohamed.
According to the founders, the latest funding round will fuel further expansion efforts into other East African regions and facilitate further investment in its proprietary technology platform and operations.
“With the support of our investors, we are accelerating the development of our product functionalities and creating other value-added service offerings,” said Omar. The startup also has its eyes on the rest of sub-Saharan Africa going forward.
According to Zachariah George, who is now a strategic advisor to Taz Technologies and also the co-founder and chief investment officer (CIO) of the Startupbootcamp Afritech programme — which Taz happen to have gotten into in 2018 — the latest funding round which drew in a strong consortium of global investors, and the various corporate partnerships locked in by Taz, is a vindication of the model and an indication that the startup is headed in the right direction.
Featured Image Courtesy: TheTractionStage
