EchoVC is excited to announce its seed investment into Senga, an innovative logistics startup in Kenya, and a first-mover in Africa, tackling a highly complex problem of "consolidation" logistics.
Senga uses a proprietary methodology that drastically cuts down delivery timelines for FMCG companies and other suppliers, using consolidation to deliver fragmented loads to large supermarkets across Kenya via continuous strings of trips. Senga has deconstructed traditional approaches used globally in consolidated delivery.
By tackling this complex problem, Senga is providing significant value to different participants in their ecosystem. Suppliers can send and receive inventory in a guaranteed time of less than 48hrs, as opposed to a typical time of 3-7 days. This is a critical issue as a delay in goods arriving at the supermarket means inventory spends more time in transit instead of on the shelf to sell – resulting in out-of-stock incidences, mismatched ordering and, ultimately, loss of sales.
We were intrigued by Senga’s differentiated approach toward an untapped space in African logistics. Additionally, we estimate Kenya's formal grocery retail market to be approximately $8bn per year of sales, and the transportation costs to move inventory to supermarkets and retailers as roughly $400m per year.
A key part of our investment thesis was to back June Odongo - one of the most driven, analytical, and ambitious founders we have come across.
June is attracted to difficult problems, and she views her approach to disrupting logistics as akin to "solving how data packets move in a network".
She was born in Kenya and graduated from high school at the age of 16, following which she moved to the United States and put herself through college - working full-time to raise money for her tuition.
She graduated with a Computer Science degree, magna cum laude, and worked at EMC for over 7 years, first as a back-end software engineer, and later as a tech lead where she oversaw the delivery of products that generated over $1bn in annual revenue. Later, she became a Snr. Product Manager at EMC, helping lead the execution of various products before leaving for Harvard Business School. Subsequently, following a role at Cisco Meraki as GM of its mobility software, June decided to create Senga.
Beyond her inspiring background, we've been extremely impressed with June's affinity for problem-solving, her highly driven personality, and her global perspective. Furthermore, we were excited with the path she has visualized for growing Senga, beyond consolidation logistics, into an ecosystem of adjacent software and financial services.
EchoVC, as the first institutional fund investing in Senga, joins existing shareholders in the company including two former C-suite executives from EMC and VMWare. We are tremendously excited to partner with June and support her on this journey as she builds Senga.