Swami for those of you who are standing around and are wondering what to listen to I invite you to join this hub I'm honored to be the first of eight conversations we're gonna have today about the emerging markets and Technology two days ago the world population hit 8 billion people it's an incredible number but if you walk around this conference today you will see that most of the companies you meet are trying to fix problems for the very top tier of that 8 billion people actually if I push you harder I'll tell you something that
will sit hard on all of our brains close to 50 percent of that 8 billion people live under five dollars a day and what we're building at jabu is a revolutionizing Marketplace and an iconic brand that's going to help uplift the Emerging Markets about eight years ago I'm originally from Venezuela and I grew up in the United States and about eight years ago I moved to a country in southern Africa called Namibia Namibia is about 32 years since Independence I moved to a really small town in the very north of Namibia called Fontaine and then
I went even further and I started building housing housing and schools and Clinics and my dream was that I wanted to bring sustainable housing opportunities and scale that across the region I soon found that construction is really hard to scale but something happened to me in 2017 that changed my life I met this woman in that point you see on my Google map in a town of ruakana right at the border between Namibia and Angola Inga came to me with the equivalent of 200 US dollars and said Tata David I actually want to buy 20
bags of cement from you now this woman ran that little shop in that little town and my brother and I were the first Builders to build housing there supermarkets came after US Banks came after us I was shocked that a woman that sold onions for less than five cents of a US dollar came up to me with 200 US dollars cash ready to buy 20 bags of cement so I said sure I'll sell them to you from our Depot but I want to know where you want me to bring that cement so I'll bring it
for free and she took me forget the pictures on the right she took me to that part on the left to an informal sector in the very North in the middle of nowhere there's 2 000 people in this town and this lady made about a hundred dollars Revenue every month she had built 30 000 cement bricks on her own by hand over the last two years and here I was with this massive dream that I'm gonna go build housing she's showing me off with tiny to no income actually My Brother Sam had gone to China
the year before and we spent 40 000 US dollars on a brick making machine I was pissed when I saw that because I thought there's probably a competitor selling bricks that I don't even know about and she said no no no no I made them myself with this little thing I have her stories and incredible story is an incredible story of resilience about what the merchant can do with a little shop like this to actually end up with a house like that and that's the day we decided we're gonna go build jabu jabu today is
the fastest growing B2B Marketplace that supports these little stores all across southern Africa we operate in Namibia Zambia South Africa with current plans expansion in Botswana and swatini when we first started no investor in this room I can guarantee it wanted to hear our story Namibia has two million people and they said to me go build something in Nigeria or Kenya or South Africa in less than two years we do millions of dollars in Revenue a month just in Namibia we're backed by Tiger Global and why combinator and a four capital and we're expanding and
scaling to build a brand that comes from within these are soccer teams inside the community we're not building a Marketplace we're not building an e-commerce we're building a brand inside the community that is going to guide the growth and upliftment of every single informal sector retailer we started there in the bottom left it wasn't even an e-commerce app it was me with my construction truck and five amazing ladies screaming off the top of my truck cooking oil sugar maize meal who needs it and people would come and give me a blessing and a cash payment
and I would go home with a bag full of cash and a bag full of receipts I couldn't reconcile I never knew who I sold what to or if I even picked up the right amount of money so Tech had to come in we built an e-commerce app we started building now a wallet we recently acquired a ride hailing app taxi connect this is the first time I talk about it publicly and we're going to build a super app of sorts that is going to uplift not just the merchant but every single person they interact
with this is what we do we digitize the orders so that I no longer have to drive around screaming cooking oil and sugar we optimize the shipments through a technology called Jill jabu inventory Logistics and labor inside of all of our distribution centers and we give this Merchant's dignity we do same day delivery when I first met these merchants not even Coca-Cola was delivering to them today Coca-Cola is giving us a database of clients and saying please deliver to them I'm not even going to sell you on the Africa opportunity the fact that I'm standing
here at slush and that slush is paying attention to the for the first time to the Emerging Markets means that the future of this conference will include many more startups like ours that are driving the conversation about development but this is where we are we're in southern Africa a land that is more beautiful than anything you can imagine with people that are Kinder than you can think and with money that floats in places that you never thought you would invest in we're growing and scaling at about 30 a month currently in less than two years
we're running over a 24 million run rate our team when I made this slide was about 200 and I've recycled it but it's actually 329 people from all around the world this is the woman we're serving not only but Johanna who moved to a capital and said I want to bring a better future for my kids and I want to send them to University and her shop can only look like that if there is a supply chain an e-commerce platform and a payments platform that's willing to support her this is the problem we're solving don't
get me wrong we're not replacing anyone we're creating something that wasn't there the typical shop owner works out of an informal sector shop takes a taxi to a supermarket where you buy the same products that you take home they buy at retail prices they drive all the way back to their shop and they try to resell it for a margin but guess what to the lowest bottom part of the economy from an income level at a price much higher than you pay at your convenience store we're solving that by bringing an everyday supply chain think
of sorts of an Amazon but for informal sector shops that you can actually trust and depend on we have another side to our business that I don't often talk about in public but we cannot do without we have to engage the brands most of the companies we talk to come to us and say we're already doing it we sell to supermarket supermarkets sell to them we're not replacing the supply chain through supermarkets we're expanding it if Joanna's shop runs out of sugar she's waiting a week before she can go back to use money to buy
that again so we have an engagement platform with the brands where they can see not only all the trucks that they are Distributing with but every kpi you can dream of about how this sector is revolutionizing their actual supply chain recently we've launched the jabu academy we realized very early on we cannot do this unless we're growing our team from inside out and the academy make sure that even if you did not study accounting you can dream for a future working in our business inside that sector when I said we work inside the community I
mean it I am a Venezuelan Jew whose parents are from Morocco that doesn't fit into Namibia Zambia or South Africa but every single person you see there is a Community member who we engage and explain the mission of what we're trying to build before we penetrate our community it's not my faith that's talking to them it's the same Merchants that are going around self-mapping self-digitizing and self-engaging to start ordering we measure everything how many items we sell how our basket size is improving women Drive our biggest truck and retailers are now starting to use technology
to drive the future of their businesses now I told you we pick up millions of dollars in cash so if you want to hear more we're looking to hire and that's one of the things I'm most excited about here to get you to engage with the Emerging Market at a personal level the amount of skill sets in this room trying to solve problems that are not having even as close an impact as what we experience every day I invite you to come build our wallet we're actually starting to digitize millions of dollars in payments every
day that's our headquarter in Namibia a beautiful workspace that's the face of the hundreds of thousands of merchants that we're gonna go serve these are our operations in Zambia and that's the ecosystem we're going to build as we scale our super app to empower thousands of retailers in southern Africa thank you very much [Applause]
