Nigerian B2B Marketplace Sabi Marks 150K Customers

Sabi, the Nigerian women-led B2B marketplace, announced Monday (Aug. 30) it had onboarded 150,000 small business owners to its platform.

According to a report in Tech Cabal, Sabi is marking this milestone in the informal retail sector, which is thought to be worth $244 billion and encompass 41 million small to medium-sized businesses.

Sabi helps these businesses by providing merchants with tools and services that connect them with new customers and improve their logistics and cashflow, while giving them access to a list of B2B solutions providers, consolidated into one network.

Merchants can use Sabi to buy and sell products, access financing, access inventory management and sales tools and keep track of how their business is performing.

The company is co-founded and run by CEO Anu Adasolum, former COO of Rensource, and Ademola Adesina, founder and CEO of Rensource.

“Sabi is alleviating critical bottlenecks that prevent informal businesses from growing,” Adesina said in a statement released to Tech Cabal. “We’re building a bridge between the last frontier of underserved small businesses and a range of innovative services and products that weren’t available until recently.”

The news outlet describes Sabi as a stealth operation, building under the radar and scaling since the middle of last year. Since that time, merchants on the platform have recorded more than $1.2 billion in sales via its enterprise resource planning tool, MyShop, and could transact more than $80 million on its B2B marketplace this year.

Learn more: B2B Platform Alerzo Raises $10.5M In Series A Round

This news comes a little more than a week after another Nigeria-based B2B platform, Alerzo, announced it had raised $10.5 million in a Series A funding round.

The company, which was launched in 2019 and has operations in Singapore as well, provides tools for informal retailers, letting them order products over the phone, via text message or by using WhatsApp.

Once Alerzo receives the orders, the platform passes these requests on to the appropriate warehouse, where logistic teams can get them to customers in about four hours.