Senegal: Acasia Ventures leads investment in FMCG intelligence platform
Early-stage venture capital firm Acasia Ventures has led a pre-seed investment round in Dakar-based AI-driven FMCG intelligence platform Lengo AI. The round was co-led by Ventures Platform and joined by P1 Ventures, Launch Africa, Voltron Capital and a number of other VCs and angel investors.
Launched in 2022, Lengo AI is a data-driven operating system for informal retail in Africa. It aims to provide intelligence and actionable insights to FMCG brands coming from the thousands of corner shops that make up 90% of purchases across the continent. The software-as-a-service platform uses a hybrid approach of Lengo Eagles (field agents) and AI to connect retailers and FMCG companies with real-time performance data on the sales of products.
By joining the Lengo Club, shopkeepers can increase their revenues by benefiting from insights on customer behaviours, alerts on new products and a loyalty point system. On the corporate end, it helps local companies in the FMCG sector optimise their resources, and provides purchasing behaviour data to international companies aiming to invest in Africa.
The investment will be used to expand Lengo AI’s tech and sales teams, further develop the AI-portion of the product, and enter new African markets. The founding team is made up of Max Smith (CEO), who has an extensive background in sales and market research across Africa, Roger Xavier Macia (CCO, former CCO at Jumia in Senegal), and Ismaila Seck (CTO), who is a veteran of Senegal’s AI community with a PhD in machine and deep learning.
“Lengo AI’s platform already provides near real-time market monitoring from a ground-level perspective for over 2,000 products. Now we are working on leveraging AI to connect at scale with the last node of the retail network: the corner shops,” Smith explains.
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