The green paper plane. A logo that promises delivery, and a company that mostly delivers credit.
Building financial infrastructure for Africa's supply chains - one corner-shop distributor at a time.
In a single-room shop on a side street in Dar es Salaam, a man restocks shelves with Coca-Cola and AB InBev. He is what economists politely call a "micro-distribution centre." He is also, quietly, a data point - and a borrower. The software running his sales lives on a phone that often has no signal. The company behind that software is Ramani.io.
Ramani - Swahili for "map" - spent its first years mapping a part of the economy that the spreadsheets of global brands never reached. It hands small distributors a point-of-sale and inventory app, watches what sells, and then does the thing banks would not: it lends against that. Today it has moved beyond lending its own balance sheet. It runs a marketplace where banks line up to fund the inventory of people they would once have ignored.
Africa's consumer-packaged-goods supply chain is worth roughly $1 trillion. Most of it flows through small distributors and resellers who keep records in notebooks, restock by phone call, and have no credit history a lender would recognize. The data was fragmented. The financing was absent. And the two problems, it turns out, were the same problem.
A brand could ship a pallet of soda into a city and lose sight of it the moment it left the warehouse. The distributor moving that soda could not borrow $500 to buy the next pallet, because no institution could see he was good for it. Everyone was operating in the dark, and the dark is expensive.
Ramani's bet was that if you digitize the boring middle - the inventory counts, the restock orders, the daily till - the financing falls out of the data almost as a byproduct. Boring, it turns out, is where the money was hiding.
Ramani was founded in 2019 by Iain Usiri, his brother Calvin, and Martin Kibet. Iain had been a product manager at Salesforce after studying computer science at Stanford. Calvin had built enterprise software at Capgemini. They had the Silicon Valley resume and chose to point it at Tanzanian dukas instead of dashboards. Then they did something most software startups never attempt: they applied for, and won, a lending license from the Bank of Tanzania.
Ex-Salesforce product manager. Stanford CS. The face of the funding rounds and the lending license.
Built enterprise software at Capgemini. Trinity University, Economics & CS. Iain's brother and the platform's architect.
Runs the operation on the ground - the distributors, the field teams, the unglamorous logistics.
Three founders who decided that the most interesting frontier in tech was a shelf of soft drinks nobody had bothered to digitize.
The order matters. Ramani gives distributors a merchant-management system - point of sale, stock tracking, procurement - that works even when the internet does not. Offline-first is not a feature here; it is survival. In the markets Ramani serves, assuming connectivity is how you build software nobody can use.
Real-time sales, stock tracking, geo-fencing, check-in history, targets, rewards - on a phone, online or off.
Digitizes restocking from FMCG brands, replacing the phone-call-and-notebook routine.
30-day inventory financing underwritten on the platform's own sales data. Backed by a Bank of Tanzania license.
Banks like Stanbic and TCB plug in as capital partners to fund distributor credit at scale.
The pivot: resellers buying inventory directly from brands, marketplace-style.
Iain Usiri, Calvin Usiri and Martin Kibet start Ramani to digitize micro-distribution in Tanzania.
Joins YC's W20 batch, putting an African supply-chain startup in front of Silicon Valley.
Undisclosed seed backed by Village Global, Goat Capital, Hustle Fund, Future Africa, Launch Africa, Raba and others.
Equity-and-debt round led by Flexcap Ventures and Jared Schreiber. Bank of Tanzania grants a lending license; a 30-day inventory-financing product launches.
Stanbic becomes Ramani's first marketplace capital partner, signaling the shift from lending its own book to orchestrating others'.
Tanzania Commercial Bank becomes the second capital partner. Disbursements grow 136% month-on-month as Ramani leans into B2B e-commerce.
Skeptics are right to ask whether digitizing dukas actually adds up. Here is what Ramani has reported. In its first reported year, roughly $72M in goods moved across the platform, riding 68% month-over-month GMV growth. Since then it has facilitated more than $210M in cumulative loans, with an average loan around $47,000 - not micro-loans to individuals, but real working capital to real distributors.
Four numbers that turn "an app for shopkeepers" into "financial infrastructure." The decimal points do the persuading.
Different units, one story: the capital Ramani raised is dwarfed by the capital it has since moved through the supply chain. Figures are company-reported and approximate.
Who's plugged in. Products from Coca-Cola, Diageo and AB InBev flow through the distributors Ramani serves. On the capital side, Stanbic Bank and Tanzania Commercial Bank now fund credit through Ramani's marketplace - the banks bring the money, Ramani brings the visibility that makes lending it safe.
It would be easy to file Ramani under "African retail-tech" and move on. The founders frame it differently: they are building financial infrastructure, and the POS app is simply the wedge. A distributor who can see his own sales can prove his creditworthiness. A bank that can see those sales can lend with confidence. A brand that can see the whole chain can plan. Three parties, one ledger, previously none of it written down.
The pivot underway - from direct lender toward a B2B e-commerce marketplace - is the logical next move. Lending off your own balance sheet has a ceiling. Becoming the place where banks and brands and resellers all transact does not. Ramani would rather own the rails than the risk.
Return to that single-room shop in Dar es Salaam. The shelves still hold soda. But now the phone in the owner's hand records every sale, even with no signal, and syncs when it can. When he needs to restock, he does not call a number and hope. He orders through an app. When he is short on cash for the next pallet, a bank he has never met - underwriting him on data he generated himself - funds it in days, not never.
Multiply that by the thousands of distributors moving a trillion dollars of goods across the continent, and the unglamorous middle of the supply chain becomes the most interesting financial frontier nobody was watching. Ramani was watching. That is the wager: that the future of African finance was sitting on a shelf the whole time, between the warehouse and the corner shop, waiting for someone to write it down.