Founded in 2012 as the Africa Internet Group, Jumia was one of Africa’s very first tech companies. It began as a humble mobile app available in Nigeria, Morocco, and Egypt, where small businesses could sell their products directly to consumers. Its mission is to empower African small businesses by giving them the tools and a platform to sell their retail goods online. It later became the continent’s first official “unicorn” — i.e. a private company to be valued at more than $1 billion.

Today, Jumia has become a pan-African e-commerce powerhouse. It now boasts 15 million monthly visitors and seven million paying consumers, with 110,000 vendors selling more than six million products. It facilitated around 1 billion Euros worth of gross merchandise volume in 2019, and captured 160 million Euros of that as its own revenue. Jumia derives revenue from buying and then selling others’ goods on its own platform. But it’s been much more interested in acting as the tech middleman that coordinates logistics and payments for other third parties.