Sendy raised $26.5M to fix African logistics — it died waiting for the next round

Sendy was co-founded in Nairobi in 2015 by Meshack Alloys, Evanson Biwott, Don Okoth and Malaika Judd, to digitise Africa's fragmented logistics: matching retailers buying fast-moving consumer goods directly from manufacturers with the trucks and riders to move them. Over eight years it raised $26.5 million from investors including Toyota Tsusho, Keppel Capital and MOL PLUS, the venture arm of Japan's Mitsui O.S.K. Lines.

The business ran on the same thin margins as every B2B e-logistics player — operational costs high, customer pricing marginal — and by 2023 it had already cut: layoffs, a product line shut, Nigeria exited. The plan was a $100 million raise to reach scale. What arrived was a fraction of that from MOL PLUS, and then a key investor in the later round backed out entirely.

The money ran out around June 2023; by 8 August the shutdown was public and the asset sale had begun — tech and fulfilment operations shopped to regional players including Trella, Sabi and Wasoko, with more than 200 employees affected. Sendy's failure is the classic shape of African startup economics: real demand, real infrastructure value, and a capital requirement the available rounds could not meet at the scale the unit economics demanded.