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Nigerian e-commerce site Jumia reels in $35mn funding

Nigeria , 18 Jun 2013

Nigerian e-commerce site Jumia reels in $35mn funding

Dubbed “Africa’s Amazon.com”, Nigerian e-commerce website Jumia has celebrated its one year annivessary and announced that it has received an additional $35 million in funding.

The investment is from Millicom -- which offers digital lifestyle products and services to emerging markets. Millicom is also affiliated with GSM operator Tigo.

The funding boost that Millicom has provided Jumia with is, in turn, reported to be the largest that any Nigerian online company has raised and is planned to enable Jumia to move to a 90,000 square feet warehouse in Lagos.

Jumia, though, has also previously attracted investments from J.P. Morgan and Summit Partners.

Raphael Afaedor, co-founder of Jumia, said, “Almost a year ago, we started with three employees building up an ecommerce platform in Nigeria. Now, we have more than 500 employees and offer Nigerian’s youth great opportunities to work in one of the leading ecommerce companies in Africa.”

“Jumia delivers the widest range of products in the country and our new warehouse allows us to even grow further. We focus every day on delivering a fantastic shopping experience for our customers – fast, secure and stress-free.”

According to the online retailer, it has served over ‘half a million customers’ and has also become the West African country’s ‘number one online retailer’ as well as becoming the ‘fourth most visited website in the country’.

“After this tremendous one year run we want to say thank you to our employees, customers, partners and all Nigerians. Since our creation we have supported education programs to empower children and we want to use this anniversary to give back to society.” said co-founder of Jumia, Tunde Kehinde.

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