MarketForce's RejaReja bet: Africa's informal shops order by app; $42.5M, closed 2024

MarketForce is a Kenya-founded retail distribution company, started in 2018 by Tesh Mbaabu and Mesongo Sibuti as SaaS for formal retail. In 2020 it launched RejaReja, a merchant super-app where informal shopkeepers order fast-moving consumer goods directly from manufacturers and distributors, pay digitally and later borrow against their order history. The bet was that digitizing the ~80% of sub-Saharan household retail that flows through mom-and-pop stores would unlock both commerce and credit at scale.

The model was asset-light — no warehouses or trucks; partners delivered — and growth followed: by late 2021 RejaReja had 87,000+ orders at a $151 average basket and 40% month-on-month growth. In February 2022 it raised a $40M Series A (half debt, half equity) led by V8 Capital Partners, taking total funding to $42.5M, with plans to grow merchants 2.5x to 250,000 and double headcount to 800. A BNPL inventory-financing pilot tripled order value, pointing toward the fintech margins the company wanted.

The economics never matched the growth. FMCG retail runs on razor-thin, price-elastic margins; paying for inventory and extending credit made each merchant a cash consumer. In July 2022 MarketForce cut 54 staff (~9%) to 'optimize for profitability', then a funding crunch — an investor reneging on a commitment — plus aggressive expansion forced withdrawals from Nigeria and Kenya, leaving Uganda last. At its peak RejaReja employed 800+ people and served 270,000 merchants.

In April 2024 the company wound RejaReja down. It kept the underlying insight — that African merchants sell through chat and social channels — and pivoted to Chpter, an AI-powered conversational commerce platform. The case shows that in distribution, asset-light growth still has to fund working capital, and marketplace scale without unit economics is a funding event away from collapse.