The Nigerian logistics startup, Kobo360 was accepted into Y Combinator’s 2018 class and succeeded in raising the sum of $1.2 million as working capital. The amount was raised in pre-seed funding, led by Western Technology Investment with contribution from an angel investment fund, Africa Future Limited, based in Lagos.
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Kobo360 uses an app similar to Uber to connect truckers in Nigeria to companies that are in need of freight. The startup is planning to launch KoboWIN, a vehicle financing program. The Kobo Wealth Investment Network will finance new trucks for Kobo drivers through citizen investors. The Kobo drivers will then pay back with interest over a 60-month period. According to Ozor, they are hoping KoboWIN will be able to bring in an additional 20,000 trucks into the Kobo platform.
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Kobo360 has in its network a fleet of 5,480 drivers and have served 324 businesses with about 37.6 million kilograms of cargo moved since 2017. The startup was founded by Obi Ozor, who was once a Driver Operations Manager for Uber Nigeria and Oyodeli.
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Kobo360 was granted access into Y Combinator’s Summer 2018 batch. They received $120,000 for 7% equity and will be taking part in the August Demo Day in the presence of YC investors.
Ozor said the Kobo360 app currently manages around 5,000 trips in a month. He said “owning trucks is just too difficult to manage. The best scalable model is to aggregate trucks”. “We now have more trucks…By the end of this year we plan to have 20,000 trucks on our app — probably more than anyone on this continent.”
The startup will be expanding to Ghana, Togo, Senegal and Cote D’Ivoire. According to Ozor, “We’ll be in Ghana this year and next year the other countries.”
Source: TechCrunch