Ramani

About Ramani

Ramani is a financial technology company focused on restructuring Africa's consumer-packaged goods (CPG) supply chains by tackling data fragmentation and financial service accessibility. Founded in 2019 by brothers Iain and Calvin Usiri, alongside their friend Kibet Martin, the company is headquartered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The founding team combines strong technical and financial expertise; CEO Iain Usiri holds a Computer Science degree from Stanford and previously worked at Salesforce, CTO Calvin Usiri has a background in software engineering from Capgemini, and COO Kibet Martin is an economics graduate who worked in finance at Google. The idea for Ramani originated while the founders were in the US, driven by a shared vision to move African supply chains from manual, paper-based processes to a digital, cloud-based ecosystem.

The company operates in the trillion-dollar African CPG market, serving an ecosystem of brands, micro-distribution centers (MDCs), and merchants. Its clients include major brands like Coca-Cola, Dangote Group, and Serengeti Breweries. Ramani's core offering is a suite of free-to-use software products that digitize the operations of MDCs. This includes a specialized point-of-sale (POS) application for tracking sales and managing inventory, a warehouse management system for monitoring stock levels, and a procurement platform that streamlines ordering from suppliers via channels like WhatsApp. The software provides brands with real-time visibility into their distribution networks, informing production and marketing strategies. By capturing transactional data, Ramani builds a comprehensive performance history for each MDC.

This data-driven approach is central to Ramani's monetization strategy, which revolves around embedded financial services. After obtaining a lending license from the Bank of Tanzania, the company began offering inventory financing. MDCs within Ramani's network can access 30-day financing terms and revolving lines of credit based on their sales data, enabling them to manage cash flow and scale operations without requiring traditional collateral. A significant milestone was securing $32 million in a Series A funding round in November 2022, comprising both equity and debt, led by Flexcap Ventures and angel investor Jared Schreiber. This followed an initial seed investment from Y Combinator, which the founders credit with helping them pivot from being distributors themselves to developing solutions for the challenges they observed. The company plans to use the capital to expand its network of MDCs and enhance its financial product offerings.