Vendease, an online portal for restaurants and other food productions to purchase supplies directly from farms and vendors, has accumulated USD 3.2 million in a seed round, the firm stated to TechCrunch, an American high tech and startup online newspaper.
Vendease collects funds in seed round
The seed round was led by Global Founders Capital, a San-Francisco-based venture capital company. Hustle Fund, Hack VC, Liquid 2 Ventures, Y Combinator, and Soma Capital were some of the investors who participated in the seed round, apart from individual regional investors like the Remita CEO John Obaro, Magic Fund, and Paga CEO Tayo Oviosu.
Vendease strives to attend to the inefficiencies and challenges existing in Africa’s food industry, beginning with Nigeria. Primarily, the firm discovered a sweet spot in a decentralized market linking vendors and farms on one end and with food producers and restaurants on the other.
When a food producer or restaurant orders on the Vendease platform, the system reveals all the potential vendors that can adhere to the requirements, seeks the best pricing and quality, and then allocates that order to the vendor. According to Vendease, deliveries are made within 1 day, either by the firm or a third-party logistics facilitator.
The company familiarized that these firms required more qualitative and operational benefits. Whilst some complained about the delivery time and quality of supplies, others were void of efficient operations to handle their businesses.
Tunde Kara, Co-founder, and CEO of Vendease, told Techcrunch that the business led to an array of services – storage, logistics, inventory management, payments, and embedded finance – to monopolize the movement of food supplies from point of production to the point of consumption.
From the time the firm was launched till now, the only constant has been the erratic nature of food prices in Nigeria.
With one of the largest inflation rates on the globe, Nigeria witnessed a surge in the prices of basic food essentials by over 70% from 2020 to July 2021.
These are some of the unpredictable but solvable challenges that food tech startups have to deal with. In Vendease’s case, Kara stated that the firm has birthed a predictive analysis and storage system to aid firms to foretell food prices, peg prices, and store food.
This procedure, according to the CEO, has helped firms on the portal to make tons of revenue.
Vendease presently works in three Nigerian cities, namely – Ibadan, Abuja, and Lagos, with some of the largest food brands in the nation such as Krispy Kreme, Shiro, and Hard Rock.
