Super app-as-a-service platform Flood has raised $3.5 million in seed funding, which will be used to expand the offering, especially in high-growth and mobile-first markets.
The funds, backed by pan-African tech-focused venture capital firm CRE.vc and leading angel investors, follow a successful $1 million round in July 2024.
The platform already operates in SA, India and the Maldives, and the plan is to launch in new emerging markets in 2025 and 2026.
Flood’s value proposition for the digital commerce ecosystem in emerging markets is to onboard offline merchants to streamline financial inclusivity. Its mandate is to partner with telcos and banks to support this process.
André de Wet, CEO and founder of Flood, says: “Ninety-five percent of retail in emerging markets is still offline. Flood bridges that gap by embedding localised commerce, loyalty and payments directly into the apps people already use, such as telco and banking platforms.
“We built our first go-to-market platform in the Maldives, and via a local telco, our platform is being used by 28% of the local population (daily),” he continues.
He adds that the platform has made significant progress in Ghana, Mauritius, Panama, Puerto Rico, SA and Turkey: it is currently integrating with local players in some countries, while in others, it is finalising agreements.
De Wet says 8 000 merchants have been onboarded over a three-month period.
He highlights the platform’s key differentiators from competitors, noting that Flood is embedded directly into a bank or telco’s localised self-service app via a software development kit.
Flood delivers a white-label super app-as-a-service that allows telcos and banks to instantly embed digital commerce tools into their own applications.
The platform effectively builds the marketplace, and partners own the ‘front-end’ self-service experience, says De Wet. “This click-through to our ecosystem, featuring these merchants and all they have to offer, helps drive traffic in-store. These offers are driven by the store being shown and carry no ‘cost’ to the end-user. In fact, the end-user gets a cashback [reward] for transacting via the platform.”
Pardon Makumbe, founder and managing partner at CRE, adds: “The promise of e-commerce has remained largely unfulfilled in emerging markets due to deep structural barriers. The economics simply don’t work: fulfilment costs routinely exceed average basket sizes, and the infrastructure required to sustain traditional e-commerce models (like centralised warehouses and last-mile logistics) is expensive, slow to scale and often out of reach. As a super app enabler, Flood offers a modular platform that empowers telcos, banks and developers to launch vertically integrated commerce ecosystems by providing the infrastructure layer underneath.”
De Wet says: “Flood is about getting a merchant in Accra discovered on a digital platform or enabling loyalty rewards through a telco in Johannesburg. It’s about real-world solutions and execution.”
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