The Startup Chasing Bold Do-Over In African B2B E-Commerce As Early Models Fail

David Chima spent months watching conversations go nowhere. A seller in Lagos would message a buyer in New York. The buyer would ask a few questions. The seller would respond. Then nothing. Another week, another email chain, another fade to black.

This happened over and over. Chima and his co-founder, Isaac Edmund, had built Bondly, an escrow startup, on the simple idea that cross-border trade in Africa struggles because people don’t trust the payment part. Fix that, and more deals happen.

The data told them they had it backwards.

“We noticed that most deals weren’t failing at the payment stage, they were collapsing much earlier,” Edmund says now. “Many negotiations never even got far enough for escrow to matter.”

The problem, they realised, wasn’t trust in the payment mechanism but in the person on the other end of the email. Sellers couldn’t prove they were real. Buyers couldn’t tell if a business had actually shipped anything before. So conversations just died.

That realisation killed Bondly. And it birthed Kuraway, a company that looks nothing like what they started with.

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Kuraway, they tell WT, is what happens when they stopped asking “how do we fix payments?” and start asking “how do we help merchants prove they’re credible?”

The name comes from the Japanese word for storehouse. The business is a digital storefront where African merchants can show international buyers that they actually exist, that they’ve actually done business before, that they can actually deliver. Payments still happen—Kuraway processes them—but they’re now the last thing, not the first.

Since September 2023, the company has processed just over USD 600 K in transactions across Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon. About 1,300 businesses have used it. The take rate hovers around 5%.

Ten percent of the volume comes from repeat customers. A lot of that is diaspora buyers in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, ordering from African stores back home.

But the more interesting customers are the ones that one wouldn’t expect. A Lagos golf club buying coffee beans. Fidson Healthcare offtaking dextrose and cornstarch. Local industries signing monthly contracts for raw materials.

These aren’t the corner shops that burned through investor cash at other B2B platforms. Chima says Kuraway deliberately chases niches others ignore: chemicals, cosmetics, minerals, agro-commodities. Businesses that need to move goods regularly, not just once.

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The B2B e-commerce sector in Africa has spent the last couple years in various stages of crisis. Companies that raised millions on promises of digitising informal retail have retrenched, restructured or simply folded. The postmortems tend to focus on familiar culprits such as asset-heavy models, thin margins, and unpredictable demand.

Chima doesn’t entirely buy that framing.

Capital intensity wasn’t really the problem, he argues. The deeper issue was assumptions about how informal retail actually works. A woman selling provisions from a kiosk doesn’t order the way a supermarket does. As he explains, she buys based on daily cash flow. She has relationships with multiple distributors. She expects flexibility. Building a platform that assumes steady, predictable demand from these merchants was always going to be a gamble.

“The true constraint is economic and behavioural,” Chima says. “Thin margins, fragile trust, the need for credit, and incorrect assumptions about informal retail.”

This is why Kuraway isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. It doesn’t own trucks. It doesn’t warehouse inventory. It sits in the middle, connecting buyers and sellers, verifying both sides, handling the money when a deal actually closes.

Edmund describes the model as “owning the transaction layer.” Control discovery, verification, negotiation and payment, and, that way, they get to capture recurring activity rather than one-off fees. Fintech becomes a feature of the transaction, not the product itself.

Chima points to Alibaba as the template. Its marketplaces provide discoverability, but most profit comes from payment and cloud services. Marketplace transactions are often thin-margin substitution revenues.

“Discoverability draws users in, but long-term value comes from services that increase profitability; payments, operational support, and recurring transaction flows,” he says.

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Chima also notes that across Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon, merchant behaviour looks more similar than different. Trust is the common denominator everywhere. If trust drops, engagement drops, regardless of how digitally savvy a market is.

But Nigeria stands out for how quickly it adopted the model. Chima points to a younger population, better network connectivity and a social commerce culture that already had merchants comfortable with digital transactions. Instagram is a real marketplace here in a way it isn’t elsewhere.

The company launched its current model last year, after the pivot late 2024. Margins are improving. Volume is climbing. The real test will be whether Kuraway can scale without the capital intensity that sunk competitors.

Edmund thinks investor confidence will return when startups start showing their work. “Investors need clear sights into margins, pricing structures, and the assumptions behind reported numbers,” he says. “Often, startups present figures without explaining how they arrived at them.”

Chima, who learned trade watching his mother distribute rice in Owerri markets, now plays chess in his spare time. It requires thinking several moves ahead, anticipating what the other side will do before they do it.

In five years, he thinks B2B e-commerce in Africa will look like infrastructure; platforms that help merchants get discovered and get paid, with logistics handled by specialists who move goods across borders that still take a week or more to clear.

“The true margins will go to those controlling the infrastructure and middle of the transaction,” he says. “Connecting buyers and sellers efficiently, rather than just offering access.”