- Bumpa, a Nigerian eCommerce company, has acquired Fyyne, a Toronto-based beauty marketplace, for an undisclosed sum to enter new markets.
- Consequently, Fyyne, which has employees in Nigeria and Canada, has released a revamped version of its app powered by Bumpa.
- According to Jeffrey Fasegha, Fyyne’s outgoing CEO, Bumpa has acquired Fyyne”s technology, customer base, and some team members. Thus, the beauty marketplace will continue to operate as an independent platform.
Fasegha, Olugbenga Olubanjo, and Al-Ameen Ogundiran founded Fyyne in 2020 to improve black hair care accessibility. The company provides a marketplace for beauty services and offers independent beauticians business management tools.
Two years later, it launched its beauty tech platform, allowing users to search for, book, and pay for black hairstyling services and enabling independent black hairstylists and barbers to market and commercialise their skills.
It also raised $300,000 from several investors, including Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer, Techstars, BKR Capital, and Google for Startups.
Later, Fyyne moved into the United States and the United Kingdom, broadened its scope to include beauty services, and started serving a larger clientele.
Per the terms of the agreement, Olubanjo and Ogundiran have already left the startup, and Fasegha has joined Bumpa as an advisor. The eCommerce company plans to announce Fyyne’s new CEO soon.
On the acquisition, Fasegha said, “Bumpa is very aligned with our mission at Fyyne, and they have been doing similar work to great success in the Nigerian market.”
Consequently, as Fynne considers the prospect of entering the African market, where Bumpa has a strong presence, he said the Nigerian-based eCommerce firm is also gearing up for expansion into the West.
Meanwhile, Adetunji Opayele and Kelvin Umechukwu founded Bumpa in 2021 to help retailers manage and grow their businesses using their smartphones. It enables users to manage inventory, process payments, manage bookkeeping, fulfil orders, monitor sales, request dispatch for delivery, and interact with customers.
In August 2022, it announced the integration of its platform with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, to boost social commerce for business owners.
Following a $200,000 pre-seed funding round in 2021, Bumpa closed a $4 million seed round in October 2022 to expand into new African markets and hire new talent.
