- Bumpa, a Nigerian eCommerce company, has acquired Fyyne, a Toronto-based beauty marketplace, for an undisclosed sum to enter new markets.
- According to Jeffrey Fasegha, Fyyne’s CEO, the company will transfer its technology, customer base, and some team members to Bumpa. Thus, the beauty marketplace will continue to operate as an independent platform.
Fasegha, Olugbenga Olubanjo, and Al-Ameen Ogundiran founded Fyyne in 2020 to improve black hair care accessibility. The company provides a marketplace for beauty services and offers independent beauticians business management tools.
Two years later, it launched its beauty tech platform, allowing users to search for, book, and pay for black hairstyling services and enabling independent black hairstylists and barbers to market and commercialise their skills.
While the company had employees in Nigeria and Canada, most of its users were in Canada, with a few in the United Kingdom and the United States. Fyyne will reportedly transfer its technology, customer base, and some team members to Bumpa.
However, someone familiar with the matter said Ogundiran left Fyyne in December 2022, citing "leadership issues."
Consequently, in March 2023, Fyyne allegedly shut down, laying off its development team in Nigeria and two employees in Canada.
The source maintained that the company's closure was not due to a lack of funding. For context, Fyyne reportedly raised $300,000 from several investors, including Techstars.
Nonetheless, the company did not provide the impacted employees with severance packages. But before they left, the CEO asked the staff to leave their CVs so that the company could connect them with potential employers.
On the acquisition, Fasegha said, “Bumpa is very aligned with our mission at Fyyne, and they have been doing similar work to great success in the Nigerian market.”
Consequently, as Fynne considers the prospect of entering the African market, where Bumpa has a strong presence, he said the Nigerian-based eCommerce firm is also gearing up for expansion into the West.
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Meanwhile, Adetunji Opayele and Kelvin Umechukwu founded Bumpa in 2021 to help retailers manage and grow their businesses using their smartphones. It enables users to manage inventory, process payments, manage bookkeeping, fulfil orders, monitor sales, request dispatch for delivery, and interact with customers.
In August 2022, it announced the integration of its platform with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, to boost social commerce for business owners.
Following a $200,000 pre-seed funding round in 2021, Bumpa closed a $4 million seed round in October 2022 to expand into new African markets and hire new talent.
