The Sendy / TABB Story: The comeback after the collapse
On the second of June, twenty twenty six, a fuel credit line went live at Galana Energies stations across East Africa.
Fleet operators could draw fuel now, and repay in thirty to ninety days.
To them, the credit was interest-free.
The company behind it was called TABB. It had launched publicly in Nairobi six months earlier.
Speaking for TABB at the launch was its Director of Mobility, Don Okoth.
In twenty fifteen, Don Okoth was one of four people who co-founded a logistics company in Nairobi called Sendy.
In September twenty twenty three, Sendy went into administration.
In January twenty twenty, when Sendy raised twenty million dollars, the services it offered its own drivers already included fuel credit.
MARKETPLACE
Sendy was founded in Nairobi in twenty fifteen. It had four co-founders: Meshack Alloys, Evanson Biwott, Don Okoth and Malaika Judd.
Meshack Alloys became its chief executive.
It is often told as one founder’s story. It began as four people’s.
It started with motorbikes.
The business was simple to describe. A company in Nairobi needed goods moved across the city. Sendy matched the job to a motorbike, a van or a truck.
Sendy did not own those vehicles. They were independently owned, and their operators took the work through Sendy’s platform.
On each job, Sendy took a percentage.
The percentage was Sendy’s income. The vehicle, the fuel in it and the hours on the road belonged to someone else.
A marketplace has two sets of customers. On one side are the businesses that need something moved. On the other are the people with vehicles who want the work. The marketplace sits between them, connects them, and keeps a share.
That is what Sendy was: a company in the middle of other people’s transactions.
The earliest figures are company reported, and they reach us through a later case study.
By that account, Sendy’s first year brought in about forty five thousand dollars in revenue, from twelve thousand deliveries, made by twenty seven riders.
By its third year, twenty eighteen, the same account put revenue at about one and a half million dollars, with around seven hundred riders.
The outside money came in small steps: about two million dollars in twenty seventeen, and about two million more in twenty nineteen.
Sendy’s business was not only dispatch.
By January twenty twenty, according to TechCrunch, the services Sendy offered its drivers were insurance, health cover, vehicle financing, servicing and fuel credit.
They were services for people Sendy did not employ, driving vehicles Sendy did not own.
A vehicle, the fuel in it, the repairs that keep it running, cover for the person riding it: these are the costs of doing the driving. Sendy was offering to help with them.
By then the company was working in Uganda and Tanzania as well as in Kenya.
The clients named that year included Unilever, DHL, Maersk, Safaricom and Jumia.
Consumer goods, parcels, shipping, a telecom and online retail, all moving some of their goods through one Nairobi marketplace.
On the twenty eighth of January, twenty twenty, Sendy announced a Series B of twenty million dollars.
The round was led by Atlantica Ventures.
Toyota Tsusho, a Japanese trading house, came in beside it.
Among the others in the round were Asia Africa Investment, Sunu Capital, Enza Capital and Vested World.
Sendy had five thousand vehicles on its platform.
Five years after it started on motorbikes, a company from Nairobi had built something real.
B2B ONLY
In twenty twenty one, Sendy went into Nigeria. It went there for fulfilment.
Fulfilment means holding stock for sellers and sending it out when it is ordered. Sendy Fulfilment was reported as launched in November twenty twenty one.
There was also Sendy Supply, a marketplace where businesses could buy fast moving consumer goods, the everyday stock a small shop sells and reorders.
At its peak, Sendy employed about three hundred people.
The company that had matched jobs to vehicles was now also holding other people’s stock, and running a marketplace for the goods themselves. It sat in the middle of more transactions than it had in twenty twenty.
By then Sendy was in four countries. Each new line put it in the middle of something new: a seller’s stock in a warehouse, a shop’s order for goods.
In twenty twenty one, Meshack Alloys also co-founded a second company, Boya, a corporate cards and spend management startup, with Alphas Sinja.
Boya joined Y Combinator’s batch in early twenty twenty two.
Through twenty twenty two, Sendy was trying to raise a hundred million dollars. It was meant to be its Series C.
MOL PLUS put in part of it. How much has not been disclosed. MOL PLUS is the only investor named in that round.
The rest of the hundred million did not come.
On the second of August, twenty twenty two, TechCrunch reported that Sendy had cut about ten percent of its staff.
In September, it said it would serve business customers only. B2B only, as the headline put it.
The deliveries to people’s gates had been the part of Sendy the public could see. They were no longer the business.
The deliveries that remained were for companies.
On the fifth of October, twenty twenty two, Sendy shut Sendy Supply.
Fifty four people were laid off. That was about a fifth of the two hundred and seventy who were still there.
From about three hundred at the peak, Sendy was down to about two hundred and sixteen people.
The company said that those who left that year were paid all employment and contractual terminal benefits.
Two rounds of job cuts in one year, one product closed, and one kind of customer given up.
On the record, that is a company contracting, not a company dying.
At the end of twenty twenty two, Sendy was smaller than it had been. It still moved goods for businesses, the customers the marketplace had been built to serve.
By TechCrunch’s later account, it was valued at that point at over eighty million dollars.
And it was still raising.
ADMINISTRATION
In February twenty twenty three, Sendy suspended its operations on the ground in Nigeria.
That year it tried to raise money again, at a lower price. The talks put the company’s value at forty to sixty million dollars. Months earlier, it had been valued at over eighty.
Then a key investor withdrew.
A down round is a raise at a lower valuation than the last one. Sendy was trying to take less money on worse terms, and even that did not close.
After that, TechCrunch reported, Sendy was short of money for two to three months, including for salaries.
A TechCabal headline later put the company’s burn at about a million dollars a month.
On the eighth of August, twenty twenty three, TechCrunch reported that Sendy was shutting down and exploring a sale of its assets.
The report came a year after the first cuts, and about ten months after Sendy Supply closed.
It was in talks with three companies, Trella, Sabi and Wasoko, and with one investor.
Meshack Alloys told the publication: “We are in the middle of an acquisition process.”
The sources record the talks. They record no buyer, and no sale.
In September twenty twenty three, Peter Kahi of PKF Consulting was appointed administrator over four Sendy companies: Sendy Kenya Freight, Sendy Limited, Sendy Store Limited and Sendy Kenya Marketplace Limited.
An administrator takes control of a company from its directors, to sell what can be sold and to deal with what is owed.
The public announcement came on the twenty seventh of September. Creditors were given until the nineteenth of October to lodge their claims.
More than two hundred employees were affected by the closure.
The story of Sendy’s end, as it was reported, is a story of investors, valuations and buyers. The people on either side of the marketplace are mostly absent from it.
Across its life, Sendy raised roughly twenty six to twenty nine million dollars in disclosed funding. The two figures come from two different TechCrunch reports, and no source reconciles them.
The counts are on the record: ten percent, then fifty four, then the staff in Nigeria, then more than two hundred at the closure. What those people went through is not.
Whether staff were paid through the months the money ran short, and what they received through the administration, has not been reported.
The company’s statement that leavers were paid in full covered twenty twenty two. No source applies it to twenty twenty three.
Multinationals and many smaller businesses had moved goods through Sendy. What Sendy’s customers and suppliers lost is not itemised in any source.
In October twenty twenty five, TechCabal reported that Sendy was still under administration, and that the process was not complete. No public record has been found of what was sold, what creditors recovered, or whether it has been discharged.
Coverage has settled on a set of explanations. Too many products in too many countries. A hundred million dollar raise attempted in a cooling market. A burn of about a million dollars a month.
They are reasonable explanations, and they may be right. They are the press’s explanations. No account from Meshack Alloys of why Sendy failed has been found. There is no post-mortem from the company, no board account and no financial statements.
What the record documents is narrower. At the end of twenty twenty two, Sendy was smaller and still raising. In twenty twenty three, a key investor withdrew from a down round, and the money ran short. Why it came to that, the record does not say, and we are not going to fill that silence with a guess.
In January twenty twenty, there had been five thousand vehicles on Sendy’s platform.
Motorbikes, vans and trucks, independently owned, driven by people who took their work through the marketplace. No source records what happened to those riders and drivers when it stopped. What they were owed. Where they went.
PRINCIPAL
On the thirtieth of June, twenty twenty, five months after the Series B, the Kenya Revenue Authority issued Sendy a private ruling.
A private ruling is a tax authority’s written answer to one taxpayer about its own affairs.
This one said that the transporters, the operators of the motorbikes, vans and trucks, were responsible for VAT on the transport service.
Sendy was responsible for VAT only on its commission.
It was the marketplace from twenty fifteen, described by the tax authority, in writing.
The Kenya Revenue Authority later assessed Sendy for VAT on its gross receipts, on the whole value of the jobs rather than on its share.
Sendy challenged the assessment. Its position was the one the ruling had given it: the transporters supplied the transport, and Sendy supplied the connection.
The Tax Appeals Tribunal sided with Sendy, in a decision reported in twenty twenty four.
On the twenty third of October, twenty twenty five, the High Court reversed the Tribunal. The judge was Justice Helene Namisi.
The ruling was five years old by the time the High Court read it. In between, Sendy had raised its largest round, grown into four countries, contracted, and closed.
The court held that “a private ruling cannot override correct statutory interpretation.”
What Sendy had been told in writing did not decide what Sendy was. The court was not asked whether Sendy had behaved well. It was asked what Sendy had been, and it looked at how the business actually worked.
Sendy controlled the pricing.
Sendy controlled dispatch.
Sendy controlled the flow of payment.
On those facts, the court held, Sendy was not an intermediary.
It was the principal supplier of the transport service.
The difference is not a technicality. An intermediary is taxed on what it charges for connecting two parties. A principal is taxed on the whole of what it sells.
The assessment the court upheld was eighty-two point two million shillings, about six hundred and thirty five thousand dollars. The period it covers is not stated in the sources.
The bill falls on the company, which is in administration. Nothing in the record suggests the founders carry it. Whether any of it will be collected depends on an administration whose outcome is not public.
Lawyers and commentators said the court’s reasoning could reach other platforms that describe themselves as intermediaries. The ruling stands, as far as the reporting goes. Whether it has been appealed is not recorded in the sources.
It is not what ended Sendy. By the time of the judgment, Sendy had not traded for two years. Nor was it a persecution. It was a dispute about how to read a statute, which Sendy won at the Tribunal and lost at the High Court.
No financial statements from Sendy are public. There is no board account of its last year and no post-mortem from its founders.
So the one independent examination of how Sendy worked is a tax judgment, delivered after it had stopped. It looked at the marketplace, and it found that the company in the middle had been the principal.
INTEREST-FREE
In January twenty twenty six, the writer Moses Kemibaro set out Meshack Alloys’s path in three steps.
Sendy, which he called logistics infrastructure. Boya, business banking rails. And TABB, trade credit infrastructure. His title for it was: from moving goods at Sendy to moving capital at TABB. In that telling, the three companies are one path rather than three fresh starts.
Boya, in that telling, was the step between: cards and spending tools for companies, a business built on moving money rather than goods.
TABB launched publicly in December twenty twenty five. The launch coverage introduced Meshack Alloys as the former chief executive of Sendy.
Partner banks issue revolving credit lines to small businesses. A revolving line is one a business can draw on, repay and draw on again.
A business buys from a supplier and pays at the supplier’s till, from its line.
The supplier is paid immediately. It does not become the lender. It is paid on the day, and the bank waits.
The business repays the bank over thirty to ninety days, and pays no interest.
TABB describes itself as infrastructure, not a lender.
The banks lend. TABB, on its own account, is the connection between the banks, the businesses and the suppliers.
That is the whole of the arrangement, as the company describes it.
Once again, a company Meshack Alloys leads sits in the middle of other people’s transactions: a business, its supplier and a bank.
On the twenty seventh of January, twenty twenty six, Doshi joined the network. Doshi supplies hardware, electrical goods and steel. It was TABB’s anchor supplier.
Meshack Alloys said of the launch: “SMEs get purchasing power and extended payment terms, suppliers get paid instantly, and banks can profitably serve small businesses at scale.”
Three parties in one sentence, and each is offered something. The business gets time. The supplier gets its money at once. The bank, in Meshack Alloys’s words, can serve small businesses profitably and at scale.
A contractor, a hardware shop or a builder could take the stock now and pay for it later.
TABB lists the sectors it is aiming at: construction and hardware, fuel, logistics, pharmaceuticals and retail.
In its launch coverage, the company framed its market as a three hundred and fifty billion dollar financing gap for small businesses across Africa. The same coverage said small businesses are about ninety percent of businesses and about sixty percent of jobs. Those figures are the company’s own framing.
It was a new kind of middle for the same founder. Money, this time, not motorbikes.
The people it was meant for were the ones who buy stock before they can sell it.
Doshi’s director, named in the coverage only as Hemal, put the supplier’s side of it.
“For years, trade customers across the market have been constrained by limited working capital.”
DIRECTOR OF MOBILITY
On the second of June, twenty twenty six, TABB launched a fuel credit line with Galana Energies.
Fleet operators apply for a revolving line.
They draw fuel at Galana stations.
They repay in thirty to ninety days, interest-free.
The station is paid in full at the pump. The coverage said the line was already live across Galana stations in East Africa.
At the launch, TABB’s Director of Mobility, Don Okoth, spoke of what fleets now face. In his words: “a significant and sudden increase in the cash required simply to fill a tank before a single delivery has been made or a single contract fulfilled.”
Meshack Alloys put it this way: “Credit should be a tool for growth, not a burden.”
The arrangement was the one launched with Doshi, now at the pump. The station is the supplier, and the fleet owes the bank, not the station.
Don Okoth co-founded Sendy. In twenty twenty, Sendy offered its drivers fuel credit and vehicle financing.
Six years later, the largest launch TABB has made after Doshi is a credit line for fleet operators, in the same world of trucks and transport that Sendy served. Don Okoth is its Director of Mobility.
In twenty twenty, the people on Sendy’s list were individual riders and drivers. In twenty twenty six, the borrowers are fleet operators, companies running many vehicles. The world is the same. The customer has grown.
No source records what became of Sendy’s own credit services for its drivers: whether they were used, how they were repaid, or when they stopped. The record has the offer. It does not have the outcome.
TABB is not a clean break from Sendy. It shares a co-founder with it, it is going back to the fleets Sendy served, and its fuel line is a service Sendy had already offered its drivers.
That is not a verdict on whether it will work. It is a description of what it is made of.
TABB’s account of itself rests on one division of labour. The banks lend. TABB does not.
No partner bank has been named in any of the coverage. The coverage of both launches quotes TABB’s own people and its suppliers. It does not quote a bank.
The credit is interest-free to the borrower. That means someone else pays for the time the money is out.
TABB’s own website, pitching to banks, says they earn what it calls non-interest income from supplier discount rates. It does not say how large that discount is, or whether it is what pays for the free period. And nothing public says how TABB itself earns.
TABB tells suppliers they carry no credit risk, and that the issuing bank handles the whole credit process. Nothing public says whether TABB itself shares in the loss when a fleet does not repay.
Until a bank is named, the party carrying the risk cannot be seen from outside.
In a credit business, that is not a side question. Whoever carries the default loses money when a borrower cannot pay, and so has the strongest say in who gets credit in the first place.
Sendy said it connected businesses to the people with vehicles. When a court looked at who set the price, who dispatched the job and who handled the money, it decided Sendy had been the principal.
TABB says it connects businesses, suppliers and banks, and that the banks lend. That may be exactly what it is.
Nothing in the record suggests TABB faces any legal question like Sendy’s. The open question is the same one the court asked of the first company: what the company in the middle actually carries. For TABB, there is no public answer yet.
TABB has disclosed no funding, no revenue and no volume figures. It has not named any investors.
No borrower has spoken in any source. The pitch is about them, and none of them is in it. There are no repayment figures and no defaults on the record.
TABB is not alone in this market. Safaricom, with its bank partners, already offers credit to small businesses. So does Pezesha, which has reportedly partnered with Safaricom itself. They already hold small businesses’ transaction data. Nothing public shows how TABB differs from them.
On the first of January, twenty twenty six, TechCabal put Meshack Alloys on a list of five African founders who, in its words, staged major comebacks in twenty twenty five.
Nine months later, the press record behind that word is two supplier launches, and no named bank.
The fuel line is live.
And TABB’s Director of Mobility is a co-founder of Sendy.
In twenty twenty, a marketplace in Nairobi offered the people who drove for it insurance, health cover, vehicle financing, servicing and fuel credit.
In twenty twenty six, fuel credit is on offer again, to fleet operators, through banks that have not been named.
The first company said it only connected people, and a court decided it had carried more than that. Whether the company in the middle is carrying what it says it carries this time is not yet on the record.
The drivers of twenty twenty are not in the record. The borrowers of twenty twenty six are not in it yet.
Some of the same people, the same roads, and the answer still to come. This is Asili Africa. Every empire has an origin. See you on the next one.
Key Takeaways
- MARKETPLACE. Sendy was founded in Nairobi in twenty fifteen.
- ADMINISTRATION. In February twenty twenty three, Sendy suspended its operations on the ground in Nigeria.
- PRINCIPAL. On the thirtieth of June, twenty twenty, five months after the Series B, the Kenya Revenue Authority issued Sendy a private ruling.
- DIRECTOR OF MOBILITY. On the second of June, twenty twenty six, TABB launched a fuel credit line with Galana Energies.
In this series: Failed Funded
- Sendy (this episode)
- Twiga Foods
- MarketForce
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