Looking Back: Our Investment in Matta
Over the past decade, Africa’s manufacturing sector has been poised for a transformative leap, driven by a booming youth population, increasing urbanisation, and abundant natural resources. However, a critical barrier persists: the difficulty in procuring chemicals and raw materials to meet growing production demands. Over 70% of West African manufacturers experience revenue losses due to unreliable suppliers, spending significant time and effort searching for inventory and obtaining essential quality certificates. This, coupled with the general opacity of the raw materials market, underscored the urgent need for Matta’s solution.
Enter Matta: a digital B2B marketplace on a mission to transform Africa’s supply chain and elevate the continent’s position in the global economy.
Matta connects buyers and sellers of chemicals and raw industrial materials, leveraging modern transaction infrastructure to facilitate trade, and guarantee constant supply within the African market. Their end to end tech-based platform enables seamless, painless transactions between producers and manufacturers all in one place.
In 2022, we joined Matta’s pre-seed round as they were getting their marketplace off the ground in Nigeria. Today, they have a significant presence in numerous other markets on the continent, including Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mauritius, with plans to further expand into South Africa and Eastern Africa.
Three primary factors drove home our decision to invest in Matta.
A Founder with Deep Sector Experience
Two things immediately stand out about Mudiaga Mowoe, founder of Matta: his firm belief in Africa’s ability to structurally transform –with the right tools– and his strong leadership of a management team he trusts deeply.
While a successful start-up stems from a good idea, it requires a capable founder and founding team to execute and facilitate its growth from an idea into a profitable venture. Mowoe’s dynamic sector experience and convictions about the need for a perfect management team spoke to his capacity to succeed as a founder.
Before founding Matta, Mowoe was an experienced chemical and raw materials sales executive. His decade-long experience –and struggles– within the sector were what eventually led him to Matta’s blueprint.
During Mowoe’s time at manufacturing companies: Ferro and Momentum Chemicals, when clients asked for chemicals and raw materials that the company did not produce, his only recourse was to manually source a different supplier for them. As he attempted to facilitate individual B2B transactions, Mowoe realised that there was a major need for some sort of central repository for chemicals and raw materials. The idea behind Matta was born.
A few years later, the combination of his passion, hard work, and knowledge of the sector would enable him to found and successfully grow Matta. Although Mowoe is a sole founder, he himself emphasises that he hardly feels like one, as he has built a management team that is just as invested in Matta’s success.
A Lucrative Market Opportunity
As the manufacturing sector in Africa gains footing, an increased demand for locally made goods necessitates a corresponding demand for the required raw materials.
In 2022, there were only four B2B marketplaces for chemicals and raw materials overwhelmingly focused on North America and Asia. Within Africa, the chemical and raw inputs sales market was highly fragmented, posing operational challenges that threatened the bottom lines of chemical producers and manufacturers alike.
Our specific research into the Nigerian market revealed that manufacturers particularly struggled with sourcing these materials, with a status quo defined by low visibility into supplier inventories and long wait times for the requisite quality confirmations and paperwork.
As such, we saw a promising market opportunity, with tremendous growth potential over the coming years. Matta offered a potential solution to this opacity problem that plagued the entire value chain in Africa.
Given their unique value proposition, it was not surprising that their empirical track record in early 2022, although relatively short, was also quite impressive.
A Transformative Vision
At Oui Capital, we back bold entrepreneurs seeking to leverage technology to drive Africa forward. Matta’s mission — to catalyse Africa’s industrialisation — deeply aligns with our firm ethos. Our investment in Matta was more than just an investment into an excellent business case — it was an investment into a transformative vision of Africa’s self-determination: self-sustaining widespread economic growth driven by a modern industrial revolution.
“The strength of economies are based on the strength of their private sectors. And if you look at economies with very strong private sectors, they may not necessarily have raw materials, but they have very strong manufacturing industries” — Mudiaga Mowoe
Matta was founded on the belief that achieving strong economic growth across Africa begins by reducing over-reliance on imports and strengthening the capacities of the continent’s primary and secondary manufacturing sectors. Using Africa’s abundant chemical and raw material inputs in African manufactured goods, as opposed to exporting them overseas, is key to replacing historic dynamics of dependence with economic agency.
These three factors –Mowoe’s expertise and practical experience in the sector, the market growth potential, and the significance of Matta’s core mission– made us certain that we wanted to invest in Matta.
Two years post-investment, we’re excited to see that Matta has spread their wings across the African continent and is continuing their rapid growth trajectory. We are proud to be one of their early supporters, and we continue to support like minded visionaries using technology to redefine Africa’s economies.
Building something that you believe will be similarly revolutionary for Africa? We’d love to hear from you. Head over to our website and #PitchForAYes. Curious to learn more about how we generally invest? Get the scoop here.
