iROKO: In 2010, Bastian Gotter invested up to $200,000 into iROKOtv, an African video-on-demand company Jason Njoku, his friend and co-founder, launched in Lagos, Nigeria.
For the next couple of years, Gotter, as CFO, was instrumental in turning IROKO — after raising over $30 million from VCs; including Tiger Global — into a household name in Nigeria’s entertainment as well as tech scenes.
Gotter left the media company in 2017. The exit afforded him the chance to take up angel investing full-time and pursue new projects. Gotter has cut checks in Paystack, Flutterwave and betPawa and co-runs Spark, an investment vehicle he launched with Njoku.
In 2018, he started a pre-school chain based in the U.K. and South Africa. Two years later, he became part of the founding team of Kenyan-based fintech PawaPay, whose API connects up to 25 telecom operators’ mobile money systems; and allows merchants from 10 countries to receive and send payments between mobile money accounts.
Gotter is an investor and board member in PawaPay; roles that can be active and passive; depending on who’s involved. For Gotter, it was more of the latter; and so this January, he began to explore other opportunities in the mobile money payments space; specifically relating to small businesses. This led him to start Bamba, a mobile-based enterprise software for African micro-merchants, that has raised $3.2 million.
After spending some time in Kenya (where he was now used to paying via mobile money and rarely cash), he noticed that businesses relied heavily on manual bookkeeping and didn’t have software to record their cash and mobile money transactions.
“They also recorded stock components and had some form of customer relationship management on WhatsApp. It wasn’t a coherent picture and was just a big mess,” he said on a call to TechCrunch. “And that’s where we ultimately saw an opportunity to launch Bamba.”
