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Jumia has spent the past three years making its business leaner and cheaper to run, while chasing profitability. Now it has an additional $50 million that can help it reach that goal faster. But the capital alone will not make Jumia profitable. The e-commerce company has increasingly been building around cheaper and more relevant supply, higher monetisation, lower fulfilment costs, and tighter fixed costs in recent years. Jumia, founded in 2012, was burning about $200 million a year by late 2022, triggering a leadership overhaul and a renewed focus on profitability. It has aggressively cut costs while clarifying its identity, exited unprofitable verticals, stopped stocking categories such as groceries, pulled out of several countries, and reduced staff count. “A meaningfully stronger balance sheet will de-risk our path to profitability and reduce our financing risk in a volatile macro environment,” Francis Dufay, Jumia’s chief executive officer, said of the raise on the company’s earnings call on Wednesday. Jumia announced the $50 million raise, alongside its second-quarter results on Wednesday. It is anchored by a $25 million investment from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group’s private-sector investment arm, with existing leading shareholders and selected new investors participating. The investors have agreed to buy 9.1 million Jumia American Depositary Shares (ADSs) at $5.52 each, with the transaction expected to close in the second half of August. The $50 million equity raise gives Jumia room to gradually increase working capital, capture attractive supply opportunities, invest in fulfilment to lower unit costs, and drive platform usage as it continues to improve its economics. $50million as part runway, part growth capital Jumia ended June with $48.3 million in liquidity, down $14.3 million during the second quarter. It used $11.8 million in cash for operations, compared with $12.7 million a year earlier. Cash burn was $14.3 million in Q2, Dufay said on the company’s earnings call. The company says the Q2 cash outflow included a $3 million increase in working capital, and it plans to increase working capital gradually in Q3 to capture attractive supply opportunities. With an extra $50 million in the bank, Jumia says it will increase working capital during the third quarter to capture what it describes as attractive supply opportunities. Jumia can put more capital into the right parts of its business to reduce how much funding it needs later. One of Jumia’s biggest changes over the past two years has been its realisation that the African customer it needs to serve cannot be built around expensive international brands. “Our customers are the lower middle class of Africa… people making $150 to $400, $500 a month,” Dufay told investors in November 2025. “The fantasised middle class making $2,000 and driving to work does not exist.” Since then, the company has moved towards lower-priced, higher-volume merchandise, increasingly sourced from China. By September 2025, Jumia had about 24,000 China-based sellers and roughly 2.2 million China-sourced items in warehouses across Africa. Gross items sold from international sellers grew 96% year-over-year in Q2 2026, reflecting the continued scaling of its Chinese seller base and growing volumes from its supply base for affordable fashion in Turkey. Chinese suppliers provide Jumia with cheaper products, a wider assortment, and faster product iteration. They also tend to operate in categories such as fashion, accessories, and home & living, which Jumia says carry higher gross profit ratios and generate additional revenue from advertising and storage services. In Q2, supply disruption caused by memory chip and CPU price increases hurt phones and electronics, pushing customers towards lower-value categories such as fashion and beauty that the company is already betting on. While Jumia’s average physical-goods order value fell to about $34.6 from $36.3 in the previous year, gross profit per order increased to about $4.9 from $4.8. The company sold more goods within the cheaper basket; it didn’t make less money from each order. Deploying more capital towards securing more supply like this ultimately benefits the company’s bottom line. The Economics of a Jumia Order What happens to a $34.60 order when Jumia owns the product versus when a marketplace seller does? Who owns the inventory? Jumia (First-Party) Marketplace Seller (Third-Party) How is it delivered? Door Delivery Pickup Station Order value (GMV) $34.60 − Seller’s share (3P illustration) -$27.66 Illustrative Jumia revenue $34.60 Jumia records the merchandise sale. − Merchandise cost (1P illustration) -$28.00 − Fulfilment -$4.50 = Illustrative gross contribution $2.10 The takeaway: Third-party sellers let Jumia earn from a transaction without buying and holding the merchandise itself. That reduces the amount of capital tied up in inventory. Lower fulfilment costs then leave more of Jumia’s marketplace revenue after each order. *This is an illustration, not Jumia’s reported per-order profitability. Gross contribution = illustrative Jumia revenue minus merchandise/fulfilment costs shown above. The 3P scenario assumes a 20% take rate. Jumia reported average fulfilment costs of $2.04 in Q2. Why the $50m matters: The fresh capital gives Jumia more room to invest in supply, working capital and fulfilment as it tries to improve these economics at scale. More money from the same GMV In Q2, Jumia’s gross merchandise value (GMV), the total value of goods that the platform sold, increased 23%, and gross profit grew 28%. Gross profit reached $30.7 million, and gross profit as a percentage of GMV jumped to 14.2% over the year. “This improvement reflects a shift in the mix toward higher take rate revenue streams, and our disciplined strategy of prioritising attractive category economics and take rates rather than pursuing discount-driven volume growth,” the company said. Jumia is focusing on improving marketplace monetisation and is now earning more across its value chain. The company has been doing this through higher take rates, a shift towards better-margin categories and the expansion of marketplace-related revenue. Marketplace transactions are fundamentally different from first-party sales. When Jumia sells inventory itself, it records the full selling price as revenue and carries the economics of the merchandise. When a third-party seller makes the sale, Jumia earns a commission and can layer on
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In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية TGIFTWBCBWST. Several companies in African tech are hiring this week: Moniepoint, Paystack, Stears, Wave, HoneyCoin, Duplo, Quidax, Tembo, Roofteller, and Impact Hub Lagos all have open roles. Visit our job board to apply. Become smarter about tech and commerce in Francophone Africa, and the policies shaping them. Read our newsletter here first or subscribe below. Subscribe Kenya goes easy on cyber cafes E-Finance eyes Egyptian expansion South Africa’s rocket-launch plans Who secured the bag? World Wide Web 3 Events policy Kenya’s regulator says cyber cafes don’t need to share customers’ browser history Image Source: Tenor Local cyber cafe operators in Kenya can breathe a small sigh of relief. After mandating them to collect and record customer data and usage sessions, the country’s communications regulator has clarified that those details do not include browser history. The rules, previously expected to take effect on August 14, could have put cyber cafe operators in a weird position, where they have to record how and when customers use Internet services; that would have caused a trust deficit, possibly leading operators to lose customers. What happened? On Thursday, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK) issued a clarification stating that the new rules for Public Communications Access Centres (PCACs), including cyber cafes, do not include tracking users’ browsing histories. Instead, operators only need to keep basic session logs—names, identity numbers, and terminal times—for at least three years. The updated rules will now take effect on September 7, in the latest regulatory effort to tackle cybercrime in the country without making business economics risky for cyber cafes. Between the lines: The CAK is walking a tightrope between national security and the constitutional right to privacy. By explicitly excluding browsing history, the regulator is likely trying to avoid a repeat of thelegal drama surrounding Huduma Namba, a controversial biometric ID scheme that the courts halted because it lacked a clear data protection framework. It is also dodging the shadow of arecent KES 900,000 ($6,900) privacy fine slapped on Safaricom after the High Court ruled that data controllers have a non-delegable duty to prevent third parties from accessing sensitive subscriber data. The message from the bench is clear: if you collect it, you are liable for it. It suggests the government has realised that while tracking who was in the chair is necessary for fraud audits, tracking what they were reading is a legal minefield it isn’t ready to cross. The maths of the mandate: The penalty for ignoring the new rule is steep. Non-compliant cafes face fines of at leastKES 500,000 ($3,864) or 0.2% of their annual turnover. In a market where many cafes are already pivoting to printing and scanning just to stay afloat, a single fine could be a death sentence. Zoom out: Kenya’s decision to dial back the surveillance aspect of the rules is a rare win for digital rights in the region. Until the identity gap in public Internet access is fully closed, the CAK has decided that a paper trail is enough of a deterrent. For now, local cyber cafes remain a place to get online—without the government looking over your shoulder every time you open a tab. Getting paid in cedis just got easier for African businesses operating in Ghana. Fincra now issues dedicated GHS virtual accounts to enable businesses to collect payments. See how Fincra GHS virtual accounts work. companies E-finance makes a $96 million bet on Egypt’s micro-lenders Image Source: Tenor Egyptian fintech giant E-finance is no longer content with just building the pipes for digital payments; it now wants to own the water flowing through them. The Egyptian-listed heavyweight isacquiring 100% of Tamweely Financial Services in a deal valued at up to EGP 4.8 billion ($96 million). What is Tamweely? Launched in 2017, Tamweely is a powerhouse in Egypt’s non-banking financial services (NBFS) sector. It specialises inmicrofinance and microinsurance for small, medium, and micro enterprises (SMEs). With over230 branches and 183,000 active borrowers, it has built a massive footprint in a country where millions of entrepreneurs still lack access to traditional bank loans. Between the lines: The acquisition is a strategic vertical integration. E-finance already powers much of Egypt’s digital government and payment infrastructure; buying Tamweely means it can now offer credit directly to the thousands of small businesses already using its platforms. It’s a move to capture the full value chain, from the moment a business pays its taxes to the moment it needs a loan to expand its shop. The maths of the move: With 183,000 borrowers, e-finance is paying about $522 per active customer, betting on the premium to deepen banking relationships in Egypt’s MSME economy. Zoom out: E-finance’s swoop for Tamweely highlights a broader trend in North Africa: the rise of the super-infrastructure player. As digital payments become commoditised, the real money is moving into credit and insurance. Until Egypt’s MSME sector is fully digitised, acquisitions like this will remain the fastest way for fintech giants to secure their dominance. E-finance didn’t just buy a lender; it bought a massive, ready-made customer base that is seeking working capital. Naira Life 2026 is here! The Naira Life Conference 2026 is bringing together Nigeria’s top finance minds, industry leaders, creators, and business strategists for a full-day of specialised sessions and masterclasses designed for ambitious Nigerians who want to make, keep, grow, and pass on real wealth. Happening on August 22 at the Jewel Aeida, Lekki, Lagos. Secure a seat in the room. countries South Africa wants to stop exporting its satellites for launch Image Source: Tenor South Africa has built satellites, supplied components for spacecraft, and developed a surprisingly capable space-technology ecosystem around Stellenbosch and the Western Cape. What it has never done is launch a satellite into orbit on a rocket built and launched from South African soil. That is, until it made a consequential decision on Thursday. What’s happening? The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Aerospace Systems Research Institute (ASRI) is targeting 2028 for a suborbital
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Choplife, the entertainment, media, technology, gaming and intellectual property company founded by Nigerian musician Mr Eazi, has moved its operations into Itana, the country’s first digital special economic zone. The move primarily changes Choplife’s corporate and regulatory base, with the company citing Itana’s regulatory environment and its promise of simpler cross-border operations as key reasons for the decision. Choplife is the latest company to move into Itana, which now hosts roughly 50 companies since becoming operational in September 2023. The growing interest reflects Itana’s pitch to businesses looking to operate globally from Africa, offering multicurrency accounts, access to international markets and a regulatory framework designed to reduce the friction of running cross-border operations from Nigeria. “We’re excited to welcome Mr Eazi and the team at Choplife. Their expansion reflects a growing wave of innovative companies choosing to build from Itana for a global audience,” said Chinyere Inya, Itana’s chief executive officer. “At Itana, we’re creating the infrastructure that allows companies like Choplife to scale seamlessly. This milestone reinforces our vision of making it easier than ever to start and grow a business serving Africa from anywhere in the world.” Mr Eazi, whose real name is Oluwatosin Ajibade, described Itana as the logical step for Choplife, which generates the majority of its content on the continent, even as it is consumed globally. Choplife joins companies such as Reliance Infosystems, Circular Energy, and AI platforms MasteryHive, Udu Technologies and Yamify in Itana. “When I look at what Itana is building, the founders that are part of Itana and the spirit behind it is, it is an opportunity for us to leverage and centralise our operations,” Ajibade told TechCabal in an interview on Wednesday. “It is very important to us that it is on the continent.” Navigating a fragmented system Ajibade traced Choplife’s origins to emPawa Africa, the music company he founded in 2019, and then expanded into events intellectual property (IP) with ‘Detty Rave’ and sports with 1v1 Africa. In 2020, Choplife itself launched as a brand, bringing those ventures together. The company now describes itself as operating at the intersection of entertainment, media, technology, gaming and intellectual property, with a portfolio spanning music, film, sports and gaming IP. Choplife operates across Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Mali and Liberia. Like the fragmentation in cross-border payments, Ajibade pointed to the fragmentation of running a pan-African business as a problem Itana helps to solve. “In setting up businesses across the world, one of the things that always attracts you to a jurisdiction is like the amount of administrative friction it takes to even start your business,” he said. He explained that scaling a business across countries meant collecting payment from customers across markets while navigating different licencing, banking, foreign exchange and corporate rules. That fragmentation comes with a cost. Africa’s cross-border payments market is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035, but businesses moving money across the continent still pay an average of 7.4% to 8.3% per transaction. Incorporating a business can also take weeks: a Norebase report found that timelines vary widely across African markets, reaching up to 20 weeks in countries such as Angola. For Ajibade, that administrative and financial friction can become a bottleneck to growth. “I can count how many times with some of the businesses I’m involved in, that we had to go through the same process from scratch every time,” he said. “If I want to do my tech business in both countries, it’s an entirely different process, and I have to do it every time. Sometimes you’re not able to take advantage of an opportunity because by that time, maybe it takes two years, the opportunity you saw is gone.” This made Choplife’s decision to anchor itself in an African digital jurisdiction more consequential. Ajibade noted the Itana move is part of Choplife’s focus on staying close to what he calls its founding ethos. “The ethos is to build an African company, just like those who have gone before me have done, or to build a pan-African company that, in its operation, in its registration, in its composition, is truly African from top to bottom, but is world-class,” he said. What Choplife gets from Itana According to Ajibade, in response to that fragmentation, Choplife sought a jurisdiction that could reduce know-your-customer (KYC) and know-your-business (KYB) frictions, banking, foreign exchange, and corporate rules. Itana’s digital-first structure offered a way to handle these requirements through a single regulatory hub rather than navigating different systems in each market. Companies operating in the zone can operate multicurrency accounts, receive and hold revenue in foreign currencies, and move capital across borders. Itana also offers tax incentives and exemptions designed to lower the cost of operating from the zone, including waivers on the standard 30% Companies Income Tax (CIT), the 7.5% Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods and services, withholding tax (WHT) of about 2.5–10% on payments such as services, rent, interest, and dividends, and the 10% Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on asset disposals and federal stamp duties. Inya noted that Itana works with other jurisdictions and organisations on cross-border capital movement, including discussions with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Companies can incorporate remotely and, according to Itana, complete the process in as little as two weeks. Itana is also building a physical district around the digital zone in Alaro City within Lagos State’s Lekki Free Zone corridor. The idea is to create a concentration of companies and talent that can work alongside the digital regulatory infrastructure. “We want to be able to show proof that this is possible,” Inya said. “That companies that belong to that creative sector can actually build, grow, and scale even from Nigeria.” Choplife has begun putting that proposition into practice. Ajibade noted that operations within the zone have begun, with local engineers working out of Nigeria. He also floated plans for a shared physical campus at Itana where Choplife’s team could work alongside other tenants, adding
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