Kenya’s MarketForce acquires Digiduka to Scale its Service

Kenyan startup MarketForce has announced the acquisition of Digiduka to accelerate its services across Africa.

MarketForce was launched in 2018, the startup enables an end-to-end retail distribution to allow consumer brands to optimize how they deliver essential goods and services to retailers and consumers by bridging the information gap in last-mile distribution while maximizing efficiency across the sales and distribution value chain.

Digiduka is an eCommerce platform that allows informal retailers to make extra money by reselling digital services such as airtime, electricity tokens, and bill payments. Since its launch, Digiduka has acquired over 6,800 merchants across several major Kenyan towns and is on track to triple its user base and process in excess of $5 million in transactions through its platform in 2021.

The acquisition will allow Digiduka by MarketForce to combine their offerings to scale even faster as both startups share a common goal of providing an all-inclusive digital commerce platform for informal retailers in Africa.

Roy Njoka, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Digiduka speaking on the partnership said that the team is excited to join forces with MarketForce and digitize commerce and payment in Kenya.

“Our team is excited to join forces with MarketForce and go after this US$700 billion market opportunity together. Despite the seeming runaway success of mobile money in Kenya, a huge 92 percent of retail payments for daily expenses are still made in cash, among informal retailers and low-income consumers. The opportunity to digitize a large portion of these transactions and extend working capital to these retailers is also largely untapped due to the perceived risk that MarketForce resolves through having reliable data on re-stocking patterns at the retail level” said Roy.

Tesh Mbaabu, co-founder and CEO of MarketForce also said that since the two teams shared a common vision and values, it was better to team with them rather than compete with them.

“This is a powerful fintech step forward for MarketForce as we plan to empower retailers even further, by enabling them to act as a one-stop-shop for even more financial services like insurance and banking services in Kenya and other markets. Enabling them to upsell such services drastically increases retailer earnings while solving the last-mile distribution challenge and driving financial inclusion for millions of Africans” said Tesh.