Renda: digitizing African logistics
Renda is digitizing African logistics & providing product-based credit to delivery drivers.
Biography
Ope Onaboye is the co-founder of Renda, a Nigerian startup helping African companies digitize their logistics operations.
Through Renda, companies can book delivery vehicles and warehouse space. Renda has recently expanded into providing credit and services such as repairs & maintenance, fueling, CNG conversion as well as vehicle & health insurance to delivery drivers.
Renda raised a $1.9 million pre-seed in 2024, and currently serves hundreds of SMBs and large corporates in the manufacturing, FMCG, agricultural, e-commerce and fashion space.
What’s Renda’s genesis?
I’ve built two bootstraped businesses before Renda, one consulting company and a background check company called 360Verify.
Renda started with a problem a friend encountered. She was importing stuff into the country and then selling it in Nigeria. I witnessed her struggle with packing the items, driving them to a warehouse, calling multiple delivery companies to ship her product to the end customer… I was shocked by the process’ operational weight, and wondered how she could scale her business with that burden.
This sparked the idea for Renda.
What did Renda’s MVP look like?
The vision was for companies moving goods to manage their logistics from a single, digital platform. We wanted companies to plug into our platform, no matter how fast they were growing, and seamlessly manage storage, order fulfillment, delivery and cash collection.
Before building the platform, we sought to deeply understand what our clients needed. We started with a service business, where clients would tell us the deliveries they needed to get done and the storage space they wanted. We’d then manually orchestrate those operations with third-party delivery drivers and storage partners. Working with third parties rather than owning delivery trucks and storage spaces (aka: asset-light) has been engrained in Renda’s ethos since.
Our MVP’s pertinence was validated by large e-commerce platforms (Jumia, Omnibiz, Marketforce) working with us. We gradually moved from serving small SMEs to large FMCG players, government agencies (who needed to deliver maize, wheat, fertilizers, etc.)… We made our first $1M in revenue before raising money.
We got approached by Techstars in 2022, who put in the first check. We released the v1 of our digital platform in 2023.
Source: Statista
Why raise, since you’d bootstrapped your two prior companies?
Businesses I’d built in the past didn’t require a heavy R&D component, which Renda does. We needed capital to keep up with demand for Renda’s product.
On a more personal note, I wanted to move and scale faster than I did with my two previous bootstrapped businesses. Raising allows for that.
How is Renda’s product segmented today?
Companies like Dangote or Flour Mills are constantly moving thousands of items around the country and need our help. Our star products center around helping clients move goods.
Our biggest revenue driver is our vehicle booking product, where clients can order a vehicle (truck, van, bike…) to take care of first and last-mile deliveries.
Second comes our storage booking product, where clients can book a storage space for their products.
Third is our financing product, which we’ll explain later.
How do you make money on the vehicle booking and storage product?
As mentioned, we work with third parties for both the vehicles and the storage spaces. We negotiate rates with them. Our margin depends on the rate we negotiate with a specific partner, meaning our margins vary per partner.
We aren’t a marketplace: we don’t connect our client to our partner and disappear. Rather, the client tells us what they need, and we co-organize the operation with the partner.
RO insights: "asset-light, management-heavy"
Logistics startups are often placed in either the “asset-light” or “asset-heavy” bucket. There’s a spectrum in the middle.
GrowSari, a Filipino startup helping convenience stores order inventory from an app, took a blended approach. Here’s how co-founder Shiv Choudhury explains:
“We started out idealistic, by outsourcing everything. Incrementally however, we’ve taken more and more operations in-house. Today, we’re somewhat “asset-light, management-heavy”. We lease the 4-walls and the trucks, but we run the show.
Having some degree of control is essential in a logistically nightmarish market like the Philippines. Remember, it’s an archipelago. There are over 7,000 islands. We have been forced to become experts in cross-islands logistics. This has added pain and complexity but it has honed our value proposition. It’s now a moat.”
Excerpt from GrowSari: digitizing corner stores in the Philippines, originally published in The Realistic Optimist
You’ve launched a financing product (Scale) for your delivery partners. How does it work?
Scale isn’t just for our delivery partners. It’s for individuals and businesses operating in the logistics and mobility industry. Although the product isn’t public yet, it's live.
Scale is deeper than a simple credit product. It’s a superapp for delivery drivers, where they can access a network of mechanics, fuel stations, spare part sellers, health insurance providers, CNG conversion mechanics…
Drivers can buy services from the app on credit. Renda pays the service provider the full price directly and then takes care of collections on the driver side. We’ve spent the past few months running a pilot, funding it internally to better understand our customers’ risk profiles and operational dynamics.
Now, with insights from that phase, we're working with finance partners to help us scale and grow the product sustainably.
Do you view Scale as a B2C or B2B product?