Sabi, a Nigerian B2B platform that provides merchants with tools to grow their businesses, has crossed $1 billion in annualised gross merchandise value (GMV). The company’s co-founder & CEO, Anu Adedoyin Adasolum stated this on the second day of Moonshot Conference.
“At some point this year, we crossed a billion dollars in GMV. We have also onboarded over 200,000 merchants on our platform,“ Adasolum said in a fireside chat with the CEO of Big Cabal Media, Tomiwa Alakademo.
Launched in 2020 as a spinoff of Rensource an African energy company offering power-as-a-service to customers, Sabi provides merchants and resellers with business tools and services that help them reach new customers, improve cash flow, and streamline logistics. In 2021, the company raised $6 million in a round led by CRE Venture Capital, an investment firm that was also involved in Sabi’s $2 million seed round in 2020.
Explaining what Sabi does, Adasolum said, “We are a platform that enables other businesses to grow. We build interventions in different value chains that add up to commercial infrastructure. Being our client means accessing services. It could be accessing credit and working capital. You can use our logistics services. We also provide free software for merchants to track their sales.
Data from World Economics puts it that the size of the informal economy in Nigeria is estimated to be 57.7% representing $1,164 billion at GDP PPP levels. The informal sector includes over 39 million micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises. That’s 39 million businesses that need efficient platforms that can connect them to their prospects and existing customers and tools to help serve them best. Adasolum said that Sabi is solving this problem. “We are serving an underserved market, not in terms of what people normally think of us, which is a B2B marketplace. What we are doing is building very customised products for market gaps,” she said.