Founded in 2014, Sendy has grown to become a leading logistics firm, servicing over 10,000 businesses in Kenya, Uganda, Cote d'Ivoire, and Nigeria.
At the helm of the company is CEO Mesh Alloys, who explains that Sendy's fulfilment infrastructure aggregates market, logistics hub, and financial services solutions to enable seamless commerce for small businesses.
"We aggregate all these into one, enabling a small business to do commerce seamlessly," Alloys says.
Sendy's platform allows businesses to sell to their customers with the push of a button, without worrying about product delivery, storage, payments, or financing.
"With the push of a button, businesses can sell to their customers. And they don't have to worry about how products get to their customers or their storage, payments and we also sometimes finance them so that customers can buy more goods," Alloys explains.
As Sendy expands across the continent, it's looking at how to help cross-border businesses, working with regulators and customs officials to make trade easier and more efficient.
Sendy has four founding members - Alloys, Malaika Judd, Evanson Biwott, and Don Okoth - who have grown the firm to tap into financial services such as lending to businesses based on the volumes moved.
The tech firm, which doesn't own the network of riders or fulfilment centres, now has a 360-degree view of commerce from ordering to delivery and financing.
Sendy's aim is to make deliveries affordable, with Alloys noting that the average basket value of a Kenyan shopper online is between Sh1,000 and Sh3,000.
"For us, the question we're answering is if that's the amount being spent, what is going to be the delivery fee for a customer to be able to get that product at an affordable price?" Alloys asks.
Sendy also provides express services to customers who want products the same day, but at a premium.
Through their infrastructure, Sendy enables merchants to know similar locations that riders will deliver to via machine learning techniques, aiding them to find the most efficient way to deliver the courier and bringing down the cost.
Sendy's competition is mostly the informal sector, including boda boda riders, as the start-up concentrates on the last mile market.
However, Sendy has helped formalise the boda bodas through partnerships with the riders.
As the business looks to the future, Alloys says that the real milestone for Sendy will be hitting ten years, and the company wants to impact Kenya and Africa the way e-commerce giant Alibaba has done for China.
