Eden Life, a Nigeria-based startup digitising home service for homes across Africa, has raised a seed round of $1.4 million to ramp up more market share, bringing its total investment to $2 million.
The investment round was led by LocalGlobe with participation from Africa-focused VCs, Future Africa, Samurai Incubate, Village Global, Rising Tide Africa and Enza Capital.
Eden Life was founded in 2019 by three ex-Andela staffers, Nadayar Enegesi, Prosper Otemuyiwa and Silm Momoh, on a $600,000 pre-seed round from friends and family, to target millennials and Gen Zs who are too busy to juggle house chores with their jobs, especially those in the tech space.
According to Enegesi, Eden Life’s CEO, who relocated from Canada to co-found Andela, Eden Life was founded to help improve people’s lives even as they struggle with hectic Lagos realities. Enagasi himself, who usually had long hours of work, had a frustrating experience hiring people to take care of his home.
“It was difficult at first finding trained people who could handle house chores properly,” he told TechCabal in an interview. So he and his co-founders built Eden Life not only to help people manage their house chores but use well-vetted and well-trained professionals in doing that.
Currently, the Eden Life app allows users to outsource their laundry, house cleaning and meal delivery to the vetted professionals, called “gardeners”.
Quality assurance is key
Quality assurance is a big concern in home service delivery. Enegasi said Eden Life’s quality assurance processes are well documented for all their verticals: for food, customers should get delicious, healthy food that is on-time; for laundry, customers’ clothes should be clean and delivered to them in 48 hours with integrity; for cleaning, customers’ living spaces should be cleaned and arranged to taste.
Eden Life’s platform allows its users to continually give feedback on all aspects of its services. They then use the data to compile preferences for their customers and offer them suggestions that rightly serve their various feedback.
Eden’s users pay an average subscription of ₦42,000 ($100) monthly to either access a daily food delivery plan, weekly cleaning or bi-weekly laundry plan. Eden Life reportedly has over 600 users with a 92% monthly retention rate and over 70% of new users onboarded via referrals. The company said it has delivered over 60,000 services since its launch.
The startup said it will use the new capital to build and scale its in-house technology and train and expand its team.
This seed funding will fuel Eden’s vertical integration strategy as it plans to own and manage its entire supply chain and deliver its services without the need for third-party providers. The startup wants to have physical facilities where chefs prepare meals, laundry is processed quickly and cleaners receive training to provide a high-quality service.
Speaking on their investment in Eden Life, Remus Brett, LocalGlobe general partner, said: “We fell in love with Eden Life’s vision for the future of home services in Africa. The combination of this advantage with a core team who has proven experience building African tech to unrivalled levels sets Eden Life on an exciting path of growth.”
On the topic of expansion, Enegasi said they’ve been getting lots of requests from cities across Africa—Nairobi, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Cairo, and even Sokoto that’s in northernmost Nigeria. He however said that the startup will continue to scale in Lagos, the country’s most populous city, for now.
“Right now, our focus is just making this work really smoothly in Lagos. Lagos is a very tough city to operate in,” Enegasi said. “So we’re learning a lot, and as our platform gains more resilience and maturity, we can talk about what’s next.”
