Kenyan furniture company raises $6.5m
Kenyan furniture company MoKo Home + Living has closed a $6.5 million series B round, co-led by Talanton and AlphaMundi Group. Novastar Ventures – which led MoKo’s series A – and Blink CV also participated, with Kenya’s Victoria Commercial Bank offering debt financing as part of the round.
MoKo will use the funds to expand its product range, expand nationally across Kenya and develop online-to-offline sales channel partnerships with retailers.
For most Kenyan families, home furniture is their largest asset. The mass market is served by a large but fractured industry, where consumers often struggle with low-quality products and poor service.
MoKo is changing how Kenyan consumers invest in their homes, by building Kenya’s first mass market digital home brand while streamlining the value chain for home furnishings. MoKo’s products are already in over 370,000 Kenyan homes. After launching its ecommerce channel in 2018, MoKo quickly grew to become Kenya’s largest online direct to consumer home brand – growing online sales fivefold in the past three years.
“We started with a narrow range of products as we worked to build a convenient, digital customer journey,” said MoKo co-founder Fiorenzo Conte. “Customers will buy a mattress or sofa once in five years, and many families are still getting comfortable making large furniture investments online. We’re now developing a full portfolio of home and living products while building an omnichannel model through retail partnerships. Our vision is a complete digital-first home and living brand with products easily accessible across the region.”
Behind the MoKo brand is a tech-enabled, vertically integrated supply chain and manufacturing operation. According to MoKo’s senior head of manufacturing, Eileen Wainaina, “Technology allows us to deliver consistently high quality products in a scalable, efficient way. For example, we’ve invested in equipment that can take complex woodworking designs programmed by our engineers and execute them precisely in seconds. We’re dramatically reducing waste using automated recycling technology and software that calculates optimal use of raw materials.”