Afrikrea's mid-pandemic pivot from marketplace to SaaS platform Anka (interview)
Co-founder Moulaye Tabouré says switching African fashion marketplace Afrikrea to the all-in-one SaaS platform Anka made its seller community stick closer.
What was changed
In a July 2021 '3 minutes with' interview with Rest of World, Moulaye Tabouré — who grew up in Mali and co-founded African fashion retail startup Afrikrea.com in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire — says the most important management decision of his career was changing the business model from a pure marketplace to the all-in-one SaaS solution known as Anka.africa, in the middle of the pandemic.
He says the shift realigned the company's role as a partner rather than just one additional sales channel, and that, despite initial fears, the seller community 'ended up sticking even stronger.' As of the interview, Afrikrea had done over $15 million worth of transactions in 170 countries with 7,000 sellers from 46 of 54 African countries, and had raised $2.1 million with a Series A expected to close by the end of the quarter.
Tabouré also describes the CFA zone's shared currency and language as an underused advantage — network effects started there are, in his view, more resilient and cheaper to sustain — and names trust, especially among sellers, as the key e-commerce challenge in his markets; despite being Francophone, the company's biggest seller communities are in Nigeria and Kenya.
Why it worked
A pure marketplace, in his telling, is just one additional channel; the SaaS model makes the platform a partner to its sellers.
Fears that sellers would resist the switch proved wrong — he says the community stuck even stronger.
He treats the pandemic as a permanent behavioral acceleration rather than a one-time spike, making deeper seller integration timely.
What can be applied
Turning a marketplace into the seller's full operating stack converts a channel into a partner — and keeps the community when times get hard.
Aftermath
As of the July 2021 interview, Afrikrea had raised $2.1 million to date and expected to close its Series A by the end of the quarter, with Anka.africa positioned as the all-in-one solution for African fashion sellers.