We are excited to announce that SWAHILIES has raised $50,000 in pre-seed funding from The Baobab Network, an accelerator that backs early-stage technology startups in Africa, providing entrepreneurs with funding, support and a global platform to scale their businesses. The Baobab Network has been very supportive of us during the acceleration program and even beyond. We are super excited to be with them on this journey.

Why We Are Building Swahilies

There are over 100 million SMEs in Africa(3 Million being in Tanzania, our primary market) struggling to accept $2 trillion in digital payments and still use pen and paper to record their transactions, which means poor insights, lack of access to credits and, too often, failure.

To solve that, we have built a mobile app for SMEs to accept digital payments, record transactions(Sales, debts, spending) manage customers & staff, and automate the whole business process.

We have been bootstrapping Swahilies in Tanzania for a year, and we have been able to acquire 6,000 SMEs who have used our mobile app and made us generate 4 figures in monthly revenue.

Looking at our milestones achieved prior to funding, we believe this investment and mentorship received from our investors will play a significant role to accelerate our growth.

Next Steps

With our Pre seed fund, we are looking forward to build more foundation in our primary market, Tanzania, where there are 3 million SMEs and 70% of them have no access to financial services.

We will use the fund to;

• Acquire and retain more customers
• Build and launch more financial services as well as digital tools for SMEs to manage and run their businesses hassle free
• Help SMEs reach more customers online
• Partner with companies and organizations that can add value to our services and customers

As a data driven Startup which is obsessed with Unit of Economics, we want to make sure this fund also help us grow in efficient, measurable, predictable and repeatable way.

Ahsanteni Sana

All these couldn’t be possible without trust from our customers, incredible team at Swahilies, support from our friends, investors, and everyone who has been with us on this journey. We real appreciate your love, support and feedbacks.

Looking forward to be with you on this journey as we will be growing Swahilies in Tanzania and later scalling it to other 100 million SMEs from different African countries.