Bastian Gotter, in 2010, invested about $200,000 into IROKOtv, an African video-on-demand company co-founded by his friend Jason Njoku.
Gotter, as the CFO, played a vital role in turning IROKO — into a household name in Nigeria’s entertainment and tech scenes — after raising over $30 million from VCs. He exited the media company in 2017 for full-time angel investing and to pursue new projects.
Gotter’s profile afterward includes a cut in Paystack, Flutterwave, and betPawa, as well as co-founding Spark, an investment entity with Njoku.
He started a pre-school chain in the United Kingdom and South Africa in 2018. He joined the founding team of Kenyan fintech PawaPay, whose API connects up to 25 telecom providers two years later.
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Gotter is a PawaPay investor and board member, with active and passive roles depending on who’s involved. Gotter, on the other hand, was more of the latter, and in January 2022, he began looking at different mobile money payment opportunities, especially for small businesses. As a result, he founded Bamba with Martin Schramm, mobile-based enterprise software for African micro-merchants that just raised a $3.2 million seed round.
Gotter’s Experience in Birthing Bamba
After spending time in Kenya (where he had been accustomed to paying with mobile money rather than cash), he discovered that businesses relied heavily on manual bookkeeping and lacked the software to track cash and mobile money transactions.
“They also recorded stock components and had some form of customer relationship management on WhatsApp. It wasn’t a coherent picture and was just a big mess,” Gotter said. “And that’s where we ultimately saw an opportunity to launch Bamba.”
In Sub-Saharan Africa, micro, small, and medium-sized firms account for 90% of all businesses. Sabi Cash, Bumpa, Kippa, and OZÉ are new upstarts in West Africa that provide digital bookkeeping services for a small number of them. Bamba is a matching solution for Kenyan and East African merchants, who accepted more than $200 billion in mobile money payments last year.
The platform includes enterprise management software and an Android application that provides micro-merchants the tools to run their businesses. Its features include managing customers, recording stock levels, and receiving and making payments.
“Merchants can record what cash and mobile money transactions they collect and their cash and mobile money payouts. And through that initial record keeping, we have an entry point into the business,” said Gotter, who also mentioned that Bamba wants to improve cash collection for merchants primarily done via USSD and M-Pesa pay bill numbers at point-of-sale.
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“We have the inventory management components that tie in with how many and which goods are sold. Then the payments bit ultimately resulting in a point of sale type devices like Square or Yoco that lets you get a clearer picture of your business and your activities.”
Iterating and Developing The Bamba Products
Lack of credit is a thorn in the flesh for merchants worldwide; this is especially true in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the credit gap for small businesses exceeds $300 billion. This is one area where bookkeeping digitalization appears to be highly beneficial to merchants. Despite their diverse entry points into the market, startups in this field eventually converge on that single point. Bamba’s solution, which combines inventory, CRM, and payments, will enable it to provide cash advances against merchants’ future cash flow.
“These are businesses that have previously not been lent to as their credit score was insufficient to get the appropriate loans. But since we have a pretty accurate picture of our customers in terms of its cash and mobile money receivables, we can make accurate lending decisions to them in a way not done before,” the CEO stated.
Bamba, which is five-month-old, is currently in stealth mode and is yet to launch. Gotter said the startup is testing its platform with 30 merchants. Its revenue will come from two streams: a small payment fee paid by merchants and interests from its lending/cash advance product.
“We’re very deep in the research phase and quick iteration cycle to figure out the initial product we want to launch at a greater scale in 12 markets,” said Gotter.
This seed funding, according to the CEO, is integral to speeding up this process of acquiring more users and scaling the engineering team behind the product. Berlin and San Francisco-based 468 Capital led the round, while Presight Ventures and Jigsaw VC participated alongside angel investors such as Laurin Hainy of FairMoney and Leonard Stiegler of Pulse.