Maad, Francophone Africa’s fastest-growing tech & logistics platform for informal retailers, today announced the successful completion of its $3.2 million seed funding round (debt & equity).

The round was led by Ventures Platform, with participation from Seedstars International Ventures, Reflect Ventures, OuiCapital, Launch Africa, Voltron Capital & Alumni Ventures. Proparco and local banks participated in the debt financing.

Maad is a tech & logistics platform that directly connects suppliers and small retailers of Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). Their tech-driven solution allows retailers to order products from a one-stop shop, with reliable delivery, competitive prices while benefiting from working capital loans.

Maad leverages this distribution infrastructure to offer additional high-value services to brands: data, software, and services for advertising, distribution, and market understanding.

Maad is on a mission to transform the retail landscape in Francophone Africa, where 80% to 95% of consumption still takes place in informal mom-and-pop shops. “Among startups operating in this space, Maad benefits from a clear first-mover advantage in Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa.

“We often say this is a blue ocean. As the fastest-growing player in the region, we are well-positioned to maintain our leadership and continue driving transformation in this underserved market,” said Sidy Niang, Co-founder & CEO of Maad.

The company currently operates in Senegal and has already achieved significant milestones, including partnering with more than 80 suppliers, offering a catalog of over 1,000 SKUs of household brands, and reaching a monthly GMV of $3 million, while operating near breakeven. Maad plans to use the funds to further expand across & dominate the Senegalese market, introduce financial services such as Buy Now, Pay Later through a digital wallet, and launch in a second country in Francophone Africa.

Maad’s founding team brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the table. Jessica Long, Co-founder & COO, focused on Operations Excellence & Technology, was the 15th employee at Airbnb and has been living in Senegal for over 7 years, designing digital distribution systems nationwide.

Sidy Niang, is focused on Growth, Hiring & Fundraising, has over 4 years of experience in private equity and infrastructure investments with the IFC (International Finance Corporation) and previously co-founded a food delivery company.

“Small retailers are central to neighborhood life and to Senegal’s economy. Maad builds scalable digital technology and core logistics infrastructure so that these retailers can make everyday-need products consistently available to people who make less than $5 a day,” added Jessica Long.

She continues, “Maad’s strength lies in its technology. We have built a fully in-house ERP, for order, delivery & warehouse management that fits perfectly with our operations, allowing us to operate more efficiently at every single step of the logistics chain. We also collect data points on product & retailers, which we process and use to make insights available to suppliers so that they can make better decisions”

“Maad’s innovative approach to digitizing the informal retail sector in Francophone Africa has the potential to create a significant impact on the lives of small business owners and consumers,” said Dotun Oloworopoku, Managing Partner at Ventures Platform. “We are thrilled to lead this investment round and support the Maad team as they work towards building a more efficient and inclusive retail ecosystem in the region.”

Charlie Graham-Brown, Seedstars International Ventures Partner shared, “What sets Maad apart is their ability to navigate the complexities of the informal retail sector while maintaining a sustainable business model.

“Their focus on profitability and efficient use of capital, combined with their first-mover advantage in a largely untapped market, makes them an attractive investment opportunity. We believe that Maad has the potential to drive significant economic impact and create lasting positive change in the lives of retailers and consumers across the region.”

Maad’s unique positioning, sustainable business model, and ability to secure funding during a challenging climate for B2B e-commerce startups demonstrate the company’s potential to drive significant transformation across Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa’s retail landscape.

Artificial intelligence promises to transform every aspect of business operations, yet a lot of companies lack clarity on how to get from pilot to full production and value realisation. In today’s digital landscape they struggle with islands of data spread across various systems, leading many workers to not trust the data used to train AI systems and experience difficulty to get what they want out of them.

According to Salesforce research, only 28% of applications are connected, and over 80% of business leaders struggle with data fragmentation and data silos.

While three-quarters of workers surveyed in the recent “Your Data, Your AI” survey from Salesforce believe accurate, complete, and secure data is critical to building trust in AI, more than half do not trust the data used to train AI systems today. And nearly 60% of AI users worldwide find it difficult to get what they want out of AI, the report found.

The future of enterprise AI isn’t about more data – it’s about the right data. When AI is grounded in a company’s own data, it delivers more useful results and ultimately drives greater trust and adoption.

Only by consolidating their data will companies be able to fully understand the complete customer journey. A trusted data foundation and integrating AI into workflows across the enterprise are key ingredients needed for AI success.

Deploying these together, companies can unlock enterprise deployments at scale and drive measurable outcomes from AI automation, personalisation, and performance optimisation, including higher sales productivity, faster customer service resolutions, higher-conversion marketing campaigns.

Building a trusted data foundation

For AI to live up to the hype, large language models (LLMs) must be grounded in trusted enterprise data. However, with data trapped in disconnected silos, wholesale digital transformation and value realisation remains elusive. Prospects are worse when the data being used to ground AI models is incomplete, incorrect, or irrelevant — leading to inconsistent, incorrect results.

Unlocking the power of trapped data enables better analysis, decision-making, and AI automation, grounding customer and business data and metadata — a common language that integrates all applications — in ways that deliver trusted, outcome-oriented results without expensive model training.

Take, for example, real-time data that a prospective customer has just visited a company’s website. Previously, sales reps would have had no way of knowing this without manually pulling data into a custom report. Real-time data brings actionable insights, allowing for immediate customer engagement, resulting in higher conversion rates, revenue growth, and customer satisfaction.

Trust is a key component of successful enterprise AI deployments. By unifying and cleansing their data, companies can ensure that AI models operate on the most accurate information.

At Salesforce, we have engineered trust into every Salesforce application through our Einstein Trust Layer, a core part of the Einstein 1 Platform. The Einstein Trust Layer includes data masking to ensure data privacy protection, a zero-retention architecture to ensure data is never learned by AI models or stored outside Salesforce, an LLM audit trail, and keeps humans at the helm of every AI interaction. We have also built-in a feedback loop that continuously improves model accuracy and relevance, and this feedback data is automatically logged in Data Cloud.

Integrating AI into the flow of work

The need to deliver AI in the flow of where companies’ sales, service, marketing, commerce, developer, and other employees work explains why they’re leaning into conversational assistants, for their employees to interact with any data or workflow across their enterprise.

With specific customer data, employees can generate useful responses which are automatically grounded in all of their organisation’s trusted data and metadata. From generating customer campaigns, to answering service questions, everything is personalised, based on consolidated data – all securely within the confines of their company’s data and business processes.

The powerful combination of data and CRM makes these personalised customer experiences possible. For today’s consumer, milliseconds matter. The cost of not keeping up with them could be lost sales opportunities, poor social media reviews, or a disconnect in healthcare delivery.

While generative AI is still in its early stages for most companies, the potential for true enterprise transformation is immense. Those that can put in a foundation of data and trust, and offer AI in the flow of where their employees work, will be able to shift from pilot to production and realise tremendous value, employee satisfaction, customer loyalty, and business growth.

The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) yesterday, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Cisco International for the adoption of smart solutions to address socio-economic challenges in the country.

The director-general of NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi said the MoU would facilitate the adoption of digital technology/solutions for the irrigation of 500,000 farmlands in line with President Bola Tinubu’s directive to boost food security in the country.

The MoU was signed at the headquarters of NITDA in Abuja by the director general of NITDA, Kashifu Abdullahi, and the chief executive officer/country director of CISCO, Clayton Naidoo.

Speaking at the event, the NITDA boss said the MoU would accelerate the process of delivering digital services to Nigerians through smart agriculture, education, health, and other social services.

Abdullahi said President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda was anchored on delivering digital services through technological solutions, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI) Internet of Things (IoT), and drones amongst others to solve Nigeria’s critical problems.

According to him, NITDA is partnering with Cisco to boost agricultural productivity and food security as directed by the President, adding that the adoption of the technologies would be extended to unserved and underserved areas of the country.

Abdullahi who took the Cisco team around some designated farms in Abuja, said Cisco would be working with a firm in Maiduguri, Borno state, to develop a learning Centre for Nigerians on the use of Artificial Intelligence, (AI) Internet of Things (IoT) and other technology solutions to improve businesses.

“The MoU we signed today is aimed at accelerating the adoption of technology solutions as well as digital services to enhance agriculture productivity and improve health care services, and security, among others.

“This is the vision of Mr President as encapsulated in the Renewed Hope Agenda. Our Minister, Dr Bosun Tijani has developed five pillars for the realisation of the vision. And here in NITDA, we have 7 pillars for our strategic plans. All this is geared towards economic transformation and accelerated development”, Abdullahi said.

The country director of CISCO, Naidoo said Nigeria would benefit from the MoU as it would improve agricultural production, create job opportunities, and empower the citizens financially.

He said Cisco has been involved with various governments in Africa and America to create innovation hubs, stressing that in Nigeria technology experience centres would be created to boost security services and business units.

Naidoo said his organisation would create inclusive modules that would empower local communities in Nigeria and make them benefit from various job opportunities in the digital services sector and other related sectors.