ABA Editorial · Oct 5, 2025 · 14 min read
African B2B commerce platforms target the informal retail sector that accounts for the majority of consumer goods sales across most African markets. Wasoko and MaxAB merged in 2024 after both faced the contraction that affected the broader category. OmniRetail in Nigeria has emerged as a profitable operator through a distinct commercial model. This report maps the B2B commerce distribution landscape.
African B2B commerce platforms occupy a distinct position in the logistics ecosystem. Unlike direct-to-consumer e-commerce, they serve small retailers, kiosks, restaurants, and other small commercial customers who need to order consumer goods from manufacturers and distributors. The customers are businesses rather than individual consumers, which creates specific commercial dynamics: order sizes are larger, purchasing frequency is more predictable, credit relationships become important, and the logistics challenges include getting goods to physical retail locations rather than to residential addresses. The B2B commerce category attracted significant venture capital during the 2020 to 2022 period on the thesis that informal retailers (who account for the majority of consumer goods sales across most African markets) represented a large addressable market that could be captured through digital ordering, credit provision, and improved logistics. The operational execution has proved difficult, and the category has gone through a visible consolidation phase. This report maps the B2B commerce landscape as it stands in early 2026.
Wasoko (formerly Sokowatch), founded by Daniel Yu, was one of the most visible African B2B commerce operators during the category's growth phase. The company built a platform connecting small retailers in East Africa with consumer goods suppliers, providing ordering, delivery, and inventory management services. MaxAB, founded in Egypt in 2018, built a similar platform serving Egyptian small retailers. Both companies raised substantial funding during the category's peak period and expanded aggressively across multiple markets.
In 2024, Wasoko and MaxAB announced a merger that combined their operations across East and North Africa. The merger was framed as a consolidation move that would allow the combined entity to achieve scale economies and reduce duplication of operational infrastructure. It also reflected the broader reality that neither company had achieved the unit economics needed to sustain independent growth at the scale their earlier funding rounds had implied. The combined entity has continued operations across multiple markets with a more conservative growth posture than either original company had pursued independently.
The Wasoko-MaxAB merger is significant for the broader category because it signaled to investors, operators, and observers that the independent growth paths that had characterized the B2B commerce boom were no longer viable for most operators. Consolidation rather than independent scaling became the realistic path to survival for operators who had raised capital during the growth period but had not yet achieved sustainable operations.
OmniRetail in Nigeria has pursued a distinctive path that has produced different results from the Wasoko and MaxAB experiences. The company was founded in 2019 by Deepankar Rustagi, who had previously founded VConnect. OmniRetail reached EBITDA positivity in 2023 and net profit in 2024, an unusual achievement in a category where most operators were still burning capital. The company was named to the Financial Times list of Africa's fastest-growing companies in both 2024 and 2025, and its 2024 transaction volumes reached approximately NGN 1.3 trillion (approximately USD 810 million).
OmniRetail's operational model includes distinctive features that help explain its commercial performance. The company operates an OmniPay financial services product with non-performing loan rates reportedly below 0.5 percent, indicating disciplined credit underwriting and collection processes. The commercial network includes approximately 200 manufacturer partners, 5,000 distributors, and 140,000 retailers, providing network density that supports operational efficiency. The company has focused on the Nigerian market rather than pursuing rapid multi-country expansion, which has allowed operational discipline to develop before geographic complexity.
The OmniRetail experience suggests that profitable operations in African B2B commerce are achievable but require specific combinations of operational discipline, credit management, geographic focus, and commercial relationships that most earlier operators did not achieve. Whether the OmniRetail model replicates in other markets remains to be seen, and the company has begun cautious expansion into additional geographies as its Nigerian operations have stabilized.
Chari, founded in Morocco in 2020 by Ismael Belkhayat and Sophia Alj, has built a B2B commerce platform serving Moroccan small independent shops (known locally as proximity stores). The company provides ordering through mobile app and WhatsApp channels with 24-hour delivery to participating merchants. Chari was the first Moroccan startup admitted to Y Combinator (summer 2021 batch) and expanded into Tunisia and Cote d'Ivoire through acquisition of Diago, an Ivorian B2B commerce platform.
Chari closed a USD 12 million Series A in October 2025, the largest Series A ever raised by a Moroccan startup, co-led by SPE Capital and Orange Ventures with participation from Global Founders Capital, Plug and Play, Endeavor Catalyst, and other investors. The round brought Chari's cumulative capital raise to approximately USD 17 million. Simultaneously, Chari received a Payment Institution license from Bank Al-Maghrib, becoming the first venture-backed Moroccan company to receive one. The funding and licensing combination positioned Chari for an expansion of its super-app strategy that combines B2B commerce with banking-as-a-service offerings.
The common structural challenge in African B2B commerce is that the end customers (small retailers) operate on thin margins and limited working capital, which constrains the prices the platforms can charge for their services. A small retailer who uses a B2B platform to order inventory does so because the platform offers better prices, better product availability, easier ordering, or credit terms that informal suppliers cannot match. The value is real, but the platform can only capture a small share of it because the retailer's overall margin on the resold goods is thin. Extracting enough platform margin to cover operational costs (warehousing, delivery, credit underwriting, technology, management) has proved difficult for most operators.
The operators who have achieved sustainable economics have typically done so by combining multiple revenue streams: goods resale margin, delivery fees, credit interest, financial services fees, and data or advertising revenue. OmniRetail's approach combines several of these, which helps explain its ability to achieve profitability where peers have struggled. Pure goods resale economics are difficult to make work; operators who rely on that single revenue stream typically cannot cover the full cost base at acceptable unit economics.
Three indicators will shape African B2B commerce. First, whether the Wasoko-MaxAB combined entity achieves operational stability and eventual profitability, validating the consolidation approach for the broader category. Second, whether OmniRetail's profitable model extends beyond Nigeria to additional markets without sacrificing the operational discipline that produced its Nigerian results. Third, whether Chari and similar operators in Francophone and North African markets find sustainable paths in geographies that the earlier wave of Anglophone operators largely did not address. B2B commerce remains one of the most structurally significant applications of African logistics technology, serving the informal retail sector that accounts for the majority of African consumer spending, and its evolution will shape how African small commerce participates in modern distribution infrastructure.