We now know what Raphael Afaedor’s has been working on since he left Jumia. After a three-month quiet period, Raphael is diving right back into the deep end of Nigerian ecommerce. This time, he’s launched an online grocery delivery service called Supermart.
Raphael officially exited Jumia in January 2014, along with his along with his co-founding CEO, Tunde Kehinde, putting to rest months of speculation about their leaving the Rocket-Internet backed ecommerce venture that they’d helped start in 2012.
Tunde Kehinde hit the ground running with a new ecommerce logistics startup called A-Post, but Raphael has played his cards closer to the vest, until now.
Raphael’s LinkedIn profile still reads CEO at Jumia, but he has confirmed to TechCabal that he is indeed behind the new venture. Supermart will be Raphael’s third try at Nigerian ecommerce, the first being QluQlu, then Jumia. He is undertaking his latest venture in the company of Gbolahan Fagbure, Jumia’s then director of operations who left through the startup’s revolving executive door just around the time Raphael and Tunde did.
Supermart’s model is to list the inventory of major supermarkets in the Lagos metropolis. Users select their preferred store from a list after which they will be able to choose the goods they want to buy. The goods will be selected and packaged by a personal shopper and deliveries can be made 3 hours after they are ordered on the site.
The time from order to delivery is Supermart’s biggest value proposition. The service is however limited to the VI-Ikoyi-Marina-Lekki-VGC axis, and one lists only one store. This, according to Raphael, is to enable them create a solid operational framework which they will proceed to scale across Lagos.
Raphael declined to comment on their investors, but we have good reason to believe that the startup, like A-Post is being backed by EchoVC.
More details as we get them.
