Little, the taxi app sells stake of under 10% for over 300 m KES
Little declares a war to overthrow Uber and Taxify in the game.
Little, the taxi-app firm, which is also in partnership with Kenyan telecom giants, Safaricom has just sold less than 10% of the company for over 300,000,000 KES to unnamed Indian investor. According to a report which was released in September last year by the CEO of the company, Mr Budhabhatti, the company would consider seeking for more funding from United States, Silicon Valley. At the time, the firm was looking for $100 million of funding. At the time, the company had a record of over 5000 active drivers and 345,000 active service users.
This huge sum of the money is simply trying to explain how the firm is serious and dedicated to scaling up. Earlier on, Budhabhatti declared that the firm had started to operate in Uganda and Rwanda and in June the firm’s operations will expand to Tanzania, Zambia, and Ghana.
Even before given this record-breaking amount of money, the firm’s parent company, Craft Silicon invested $6 million in the app.
Hopefully, this will encourage more foreigners to invest in African companies. Instead of depending on Uber and Taxify, which were not started in Africa, we should start hugely investing in African founded and owned companies. Little has set the example. One of the reasons why African startups never thrive is because we (local investors & citizens) don’t believe or rather trust that Africa can yield something great. Instead of focussing on our own products and services, we tend to be carried away by European products. We are getting distracted by Western culture to a point where we don’t believe in our own land.
The Western culture can influence us positively only when we start to embrace the culture and apply it by creating something that fits the African market. What most of us do is “copy-pasting”. We always want to have other versions of Uber, Facebook, Twitter, or Google. Instead of “copy-pasting”, we can always embrace the companies and learn something from the companies and come up with a better solution to African problems by applying the same technology and skills from these tech giants.
In Africa, we have a plethora of problems. This, in turn, means that we have a lot of opportunities. Instead of waiting for foreigners to help us solve the problems and in exchange depleting our valuable resources such as oil, natural gas, or coffee, we can come up with better ways of learning from the best and applying what we learned by ourselves to change the situations in Africa.
Let’s change our perception and start believing in Africa!
