Wasoko, formerly Sokowatch, a Kenya-based B2B marketplace that offers a BNPL service to retailers, raises a $125M Series B, source says at a $625M valuation
Informal retail is king in Africa, with hundreds of billions of dollars of consumer goods are sold through its channels yearly.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after its $14M Series A, Sokowatch — now rebranded Wasoko — has stepped up an order of magnitude to a $125M Series B at a reported $625M valuation, betting that supplying goods to Africa's informal retailers only works if the company also supplies their working capital through embedded BNPL.
The round lands in the middle of a funding surge for African B2B marketplaces: Twiga Foods and Copia raised Series Bs in 2019, and just weeks earlier Nairobi rival MarketForce closed its own $40M Series A. The rebrand from Sokowatch to Wasoko alongside the raise signals a pan-African ambition beyond Kenya.
First-order effects
- Wasoko gains roughly nine times its prior disclosed funding to deepen inventory and extend BNPL credit lines to informal shopkeepers, who can stock goods before selling them rather than paying cash upfront.
- MarketForce, Twiga, and other regional B2B players now compete against a better-capitalized Wasoko whose credit offer becomes a customer-acquisition weapon in Kenya and any new markets it enters.
Second-order effects
- Rivals are pushed toward larger, faster raises to match the credit-and-inventory bundle — Lagos-based Sabi's subsequent $38M Series B shows competitors answering with their own scaled financing for SMEs.
- Investors begin pricing African informal-retail platforms on embedded-finance economics, not just GMV, shifting capital toward marketplaces that own the merchant balance sheet.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to consolidation: with over $240M raised across the sector's leaders, sub-scale marketplaces struggle to fund both logistics and credit books, foreshadowing the all-stock Wasoko–MaxAB merger that later combined two of the largest players.
- If BNPL-to-retailers proves durable, African B2B commerce structurally converges with lending — the marketplace that finances the shopkeeper owns the relationship, and pure distribution plays get squeezed or absorbed.
The trend: African B2B e-commerce is scaling from city-by-city distribution into credit-anchored platforms, with round sizes and mergers concentrating the informal-retail supply chain around a few financed incumbents.