Eden Life raises $1.4M seed to supply residence companies to busy Africans – TechCrunch

Life in Lagos, Nigeria’s trading city, is not for the faint of heart. The city with around 14 million inhabitants is the largest in sub-Saharan Africa.

And due to traffic jams and long hours, most busy professionals find it difficult to cope with everyday tasks like cooking or cleaning the house.

Although restaurants and household cleaning companies offer options for people who want to outsource these tasks, the market is still open to providers who can offer more convenience and quality.

Eden life, strategically Positioning itself as the premier platform for home service needs has raised a $ 1.4 million seed round to increase its market share.

LocalGlobe, a UK-based venture capital company, led the way. Africa-focused VCs Samurai Incubate, Future Africa, Village Global, Rising Tide Africa and Enza Capital took part.

In 2019 Nadayar Enegesi, Prosper Otemuyiwa and Silm Momoh founded Eden Life. The platform enables customers to schedule three housekeeping services – eating, laundry and cleaning – via a mobile application.

When the founders, Ex-Andelans (a term to describe former Andela employees), launched the home service app two years ago, it caused quite a few eyebrows. At that time, founders were increasingly launching projects in the fintech, e-commerce and logistics sectors, so it was surprising to see Enegesi and his co-founders move into an area that many believed was not profitable for a technology company in Nigeria.

“The reason was personal for us,” said Enegesi, CEO of the startup and co-founder of Unicorn Andela, in an interview. The founders started talking about the concept of home services simple when the now popular idea that Nigerians were en masse to leave in search of greener pastures took shape.

Enegesi could understand why people really wanted to move. Comparing his previous stay in Toronto with Lagos, the CEO found that his quality of life in a city that has been described in several reports as one of the worst places in the world has been massively affected.

While widespread stressors such as inadequate power supplies and poor roads are out of reach for citizens, the founders believed that the provision of domestic services such as food delivery and laundry was within reach and would improve the quality of life for some urban workers.

After Eden Life. raised a $ 600,000 pre-seed round for family and friends, started to aim Millennials and Gen Zs that hectic lives, especially in the tech field who work as executives, developers and freelancers.

Credit: Eden life

Customers can subscribe to one or three of the services, and according to the company, people try their food services before the others and it’s not hard to see why.

Initially, Eden employed a simple distribution model of delivering groceries selected by customers from a variety of third-party suppliers. But the process soon became a challenge for the company of a Quality point of view.

“You are simple so many questions about standards. We have learned that many of these small service companies do not have the tools or equipment to deliver at a high level, ”said Enegesi. “We learned that many of them have no training for their employees. We have learned that they do not have the right business processes in order to be able to output the same quality every time. “

At the end of last year, the company realized it had to invest in setting and building these standards if it was to deliver the best customer experience.. What followed was a vertical integration with the grocery department when Eden launched its kitchen and is now producing its meals. significant Enhancing the dining experience for customers.

Access to laundry and house cleaning services is available easy however different. For the former, Eden works with established laundromats in various locations in Lagos and has a network of freelancers that it trains quarterly to do the cleaning. Then logistics company Gokada handles about 75% of the company’s food and laundry deliveries.

What is the traction like for the company? For my part, I am an avid user of Eden’s food service and more than 600 people use one to three of the services. The average customer uses two services five times a week.

Across the board, customers pay an average subscription of $ 100 per month – a fee that can and can cover a daily meal plan or weekly cleaning biweekly Laundry schedule. These plans are monitored by trained professionals called gardeners who are in constant communication with Eden users to provide prompts and receive feedback.

A quick calculation of the customer base and average subscription shows that Eden has about $ 60,000 in monthly revenue. However, the CEO declined to comment on any particular number, just saying that the company had more sales than the proposed number.

According to LocalGlobe General Partner Remus Brett, Eden’s customer obsession and attention to detail stood out along with a key first mover advantage for the main investor.

He said his company “fell in love with Eden Life’s vision for the future of home services in Africa” ​​and that “combining that advantage with a core team with a proven track record of building African technology to an unrivaled level makes Eden Life an exciting one.” Brings away “. of growth. ”

Credit: Eden life

Since its inception, Eden Life has provided over 60,000 services in Lagos alone. The company has yet to penetrate other markets in Nigeria and will not use these funds to do so. Instead, Eden plans to build its in-house technology, scale its team, and use food production facilities and operational centers for sales (which provides an opportunity to explore the dark kitchen model)..

“Lagos is a tough market and we have to make sure everything works,” said Enegesi. “We had to keep working on the fine-tuning and are currently concentrating on making things run very smoothly here. After that we will have talks about where to expand next. “

Africa is the fastest urbanizing continent in the world with a growing middle class. And although Eden Life does not plan to penetrate other markets, some regional players such as the home cleaning service SweepSouth are currently moving into the West African country.

But Enegesi is not worried; the models are very different. Eden operates horizontally combining grocery, laundry and house cleaning services, while SweepSouth takes a more vertical approach to house cleaning.

From a lean model perspective, it seems a better model to run a single service and add more as you scale than to run three services simultaneously. Nevertheless, the expansive model has worked perfectly for Eden so far.

“Our strength is operational complexity because solving any of these things is not going to give our customers the experience we want,” said the CEO. “It is important that we create a complete living experience for people, and does that mean it can take longer than other things? Sure, but it also means that people will have a hard time going up against us. As I said, it’s personal and there has to be something like that. and Happily, We are the ones who can do it. “

Although Eden has a vertical integration strategy to own and manage its entire supply chain and deliver its services without the need for third party vendors, it will also bring more horizontal products to market in the coming months.