Eden Life raises $1.4M seed to provide home services to busy Africans
LocalGlobe, a U.K.-based venture capital firm, led the round. Africa-focused VCs Samurai Incubate, Future Africa, Village Global, Rising Tide Africa and Enza Capital participated.
Nadayar Enegesi, Prosper Otemuyiwa and Silm Momoh founded Eden Life in 2019. The platform allows customers to schedule three home services — food, laundry, and cleaning — via a mobile application.
When the founders, ex-Andelans (a term to describe previous Andela staff), launched the home service app two years ago, it raised some eyebrows. At the time, founders were increasingly launching ventures in fintech, e-commerce and logistics, so it was surprising to see Enegesi and his co-founders choose to tackle a space many felt couldn’t be profitable for a tech company in Nigeria.
“The reason was personal for us,” Enegesi, the startup’s CEO and a co-founder of unicorn Andela, said in an interview. The founders started talking about the concept of home services just when the now-popular idea of Nigerians leaving en masse in search of greener pastures was taking shape.
Enegesi could relate to why people were desperate to move. Comparing his previous stay in Toronto to Lagos, the CEO noticed that his quality of life had taken a massive hit in a city several reports have described as one of the worst places to live in the world.
While prevalent stressors such as inadequate power and bad roads are out of reach for citizens to address, the founders felt providing home services such as food delivery and laundry was within reach and would improve the quality of life for some professionals in the city.
After raising a $600,000 family and friends pre-seed round, Eden Life launched to target millennials and Gen Zs who live hectic lives, especially those in the tech space that work as executives, developers and freelancers.
