The Sendy / TABB Story: Meshack Alloys built Sendy into East Africa’s most visible logistics startup
On the twentieth of September, 2023, a court order in Nairobi placed a company called Sendy under the administration of an accountant named Peter Kahi.
Kahi was, by then, the man Kenya called when famous companies died. He had run the Nakumatt administration in 2018. He had run the Britania Foods administration in 2021. Now he was being handed the keys to Sendy Limited, Sendy Kenya Freight, Sendy Store, and Sendy Kenya Marketplace.
Eighteen months earlier, Sendy had been raising a hundred-million-dollar Series C. Toyota was on the cap table. So was the venture arm of one of the largest shipping conglomerates in Japan. The company had 300 employees, ten thousand business customers, and was operating in four African countries.
By June of 2023, it could not make payroll.
By August, the acquisition that was supposed to save it had collapsed. Two hundred people lost their jobs.
By September, Peter Kahi was in the building.
Two years after that, in December 2025, the founder of Sendy, a man named Meshack Alloys, would walk back onto a stage in Nairobi and launch a new company. Not a logistics company. A credit-rails company. Capital-light where Sendy had become capital-heavy. A financial network where Sendy had been a physical one.
This is the story of how one of the most-funded African startups of its generation died — and how its founder is, right now, trying to build the opposite of it.
The Software Boy from Laiser Hill
The founder of Sendy was born on the first of January, 1987, in Kenya, and learned to code at the age of thirteen at a school called Laiser Hill Academy in the outskirts of Nairobi.
His name was Meshack Alloys. Everyone called him Mesh.
He went on to the University of Nairobi to study architecture and engineering. He lasted about a year before realising that what he actually wanted to do was write software. While still enrolled at the university, he started taking a parallel computer course at a small institute in town. By the time he finished, he was, in everything but credential, a software engineer.
In 2011, he started his first company. He called it MTL Systems. It was a software shop, the kind that existed in dozens of Nairobi office buildings in that era — five engineers, a handful of clients, a thin margin. But the clients he chose mattered. MTL built software for transport companies, for logistics firms, for FMCG distributors, for schools. For five years, Alloys spent his days inside the back offices of the people who moved goods around East Africa.
He saw what the inside of African logistics actually looked like. Hundreds of independent truck owners. Thousands of boda boda riders. Tens of thousands of small van operators. No central booking layer. No transparent pricing. No way for a business in Westlands to summon a motorcycle to pick up a package in Industrial Area without calling four different drivers and negotiating each time.
Kenya’s logistics market, by some estimates, was a ten-billion-dollar industry. And it was running on phone calls.
In early 2014, Alloys exited MTL Systems. The same year, he started looking for co-founders.
He found three. Evanson Biwott and Don Okoth, both Kenyans, both technical. And an American woman named Malaika Judd, who brought the operational and international experience the team did not have.
The four of them incorporated a company called Sendy in 2014. The thesis was a single sentence. If Uber had built a marketplace on top of independent drivers for moving people, somebody could build the same thing for moving everything else.
In January 2015, they went live in Nairobi. Motorcycles only. A single app. Twenty-seven riders.
The first year produced forty-five thousand dollars in revenue and twelve thousand completed deliveries. By Silicon Valley standards, this was nothing. By Nairobi startup standards in 2015, this was real.
In November of that year, Safaricom’s Spark Fund wrote them a small cheque. The amount was not disclosed. The signal was the cheque itself.
Safaricom was, by 2015, the most powerful technology platform on the African continent. M-Pesa had become the operating system of Kenyan money. If Safaricom believed your African logistics startup deserved a cheque, every other investor in the room started to listen.
Sendy now had, in their pocket, the imprimatur of the M-Pesa company. They also had M-Pesa itself wired straight into the app — the rail that solved the cash-collection problem that had killed dozens of African delivery startups before them.
In July of 2016, they tried something. They launched a ride-hailing pilot called Sendy Ride. The idea was that the same network of motorcycles moving packages could also move people.
Two months later, they killed it.
The lesson Alloys later said he took from that experiment was important. Goods density was beating people density. The marketplace was telling them what to do. They listened.
By 2018, Sendy had seven hundred riders and one and a half million dollars in revenue. It was small, but the curve was bending the right way. And the investors were starting to notice.
The Twenty-Million-Dollar Cheque
On the twenty-eighth of January, 2020, a venture firm called Atlantica Ventures led a twenty-million-dollar Series B into Sendy. Toyota’s mobility arm was in the round. So was Mitsui’s. So was a long list of pan-African and Asia-Africa investors. Total funding raised, to date: twenty-nine million dollars.
Sendy was, for a moment, the most-funded African logistics startup of its generation. Toyota’s involvement was particularly significant — the round came with a research-and-development arrangement around electric vehicles and fleet operations. The biggest mobility manufacturer in the world was making a strategic bet on a Nairobi startup.
Eight weeks later, COVID arrived.
Inside Sendy, this was a window. E-commerce in Africa accelerated. Restaurants pivoted to delivery. FMCG companies needed faster last-mile distribution. By late 2020 and into 2021, Sendy was signing the kinds of clients that prove you have arrived. Unilever. DHL. Jumia.
They expanded. Uganda. Côte d’Ivoire. Nigeria.
They built new products. Sendy Transport became the B2B freight backbone. Sendy Fulfilment, launched in November 2021, added warehousing, picking, packing, and shipping for e-commerce sellers — a thirteen percent take-rate per order. Sendy Supply, launched the same year, was a B2B marketplace where small retailers could buy direct from manufacturers, bypassing the wholesale layer entirely.
Four products. Four countries. Five thousand vehicles. Ten thousand business customers. Three hundred employees.
By mid-2022, Alloys was in the market for a hundred-million-dollar Series C, at a valuation north of eighty million dollars. MOL Plus, the venture arm of the Japanese shipping conglomerate Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, wrote a partial cheque. The full round, however, never closed.
Because in the space of about six months, three things happened at once.
The first was that the global venture capital market reset. The era of cheap money was over. Late-stage growth rounds across the world were either being delayed or repriced downward, brutally.
The second was that Kenya held a national election in August 2022. The country slowed. Manufacturers slowed. FMCG volumes slowed. Sendy’s volumes slowed with them.
The third was the unit economics. Sendy was, at this point, burning approximately one million dollars a month. The thesis had started as asset-light — match drivers and customers, take a cut, do not own the trucks. By 2022, Sendy was running warehouses, holding inventory adjacent to its supply marketplace, and operating physical fulfilment infrastructure in three countries. The asset-light startup had become an asset-heavy one. And the margins, on every single product line, were thinner than the model had predicted.
In July 2022, ten percent of Sendy’s workforce was laid off. Alloys cited, in a public statement, the realities affecting tech companies globally.
In September, Sendy Transport was restructured to be B2B only. The consumer-facing business was wound down.
In October, Sendy Supply was shut down entirely. Fifty-four more employees — about twenty percent of what remained — were laid off.
In February 2023, Sendy exited Nigeria. The Lagos fulfilment operation was closed.
The fundraise pivoted. From a hundred-million Series C to a downround at a forty- to sixty-million-dollar valuation. This was survivable. Painful, but survivable.
And then, by mid-2023, a single key investor backed out of the downround. The deal collapsed.
By June, Sendy could not pay salaries.
On the eighth of August, 2023, TechCrunch broke the news. Sendy was shutting down. Alloys, quoted in the article, said the company was in the middle of an acquisition process, talking to Trella, to Sabi, to Wasoko, and to one of its own existing investors. He said the deal would close in two weeks.
It did not close in two weeks. It did not close at all. The buyers, looking at the liabilities they would have to assume, walked away. One by one.
On the twentieth of September, 2023, Peter Kahi was appointed administrator.
About two hundred employees, the ones who were still on payroll when the lights went off, lost their jobs.
The Insight Inside the Failure
When a company dies, two things usually happen.
The first is that everyone who worked there moves on. The second is that the lessons of why it died get absorbed into investor pattern-matching and into founder folklore, and then mostly get forgotten.
Sendy did not get to do that.
Because on the twenty-third of October, 2025 — two full years after Peter Kahi took over the building — a Kenyan High Court judge named Helene Namisi handed down a ruling.
The Kenya Revenue Authority had, for years, been arguing that Sendy owed VAT on the full value of every delivery transaction, not just on the commission it kept. Sendy had argued the opposite — that it was a digital intermediary, an asset-light marketplace, and so should only be taxed on its share of the take.
Justice Namisi ruled for the tax authority. She wrote that Sendy was not an intermediary. It was a principal. It set the prices. It authorised the deliveries. It received the payments in its own name. Therefore, VAT applied to the full transaction value.
The ruling stuck Sendy’s defunct estate with a bill of eighty-two-point-two million Kenyan shillings — about six hundred and thirty-five thousand US dollars — payable to the Kenya Revenue Authority.
That bill, in the grand scheme of a company that had burned twenty-six million dollars, was small.
The precedent was not.
Because the moment Justice Namisi’s ruling landed, every other platform that booked transactions in its own name — Uber, Bolt, Little Cab, Glovo, Jumia, Kilimall — looked at the judgment and recognised themselves in it. The Sendy case became the most-cited platform-economy tax precedent in East Africa.
A company that no longer existed had become, accidentally, the case law that would shape African platform regulation for the next decade.
Meshack Alloys, by then, was not paying close attention.
Because Alloys, it turns out, had not stopped working when Sendy collapsed.
While he had been running Sendy in 2021, he had also co-founded a second company called Boya, a corporate spend management product. Boya had been admitted into the Y Combinator winter 2022 batch. By the time Sendy was in its death spiral, Boya was an operating Y Combinator alumnus with its own investors and its own product.
This raises a question that the polite parts of African tech coverage have not raised. How distracted was the Sendy CEO during the year Sendy needed him most? It is a fair question. But it also gave Alloys something most founders of failed startups do not have. A second product, already in market, already credible.
And it gave him time to think about the lesson hidden inside Sendy’s failure.
The lesson Alloys later said he took was this. The thing Sendy could never give its SME customers — the small businesses, the dukas, the wholesalers, the manufacturers — was liquidity. They could move their goods. They could fulfil their orders. They could integrate with M-Pesa.
But they could not get paid faster than they paid out. They could not buy stock on credit. They could not finance the working capital gap that, in African retail, is the single thing standing between a small business and a bigger one.
Sendy had been a logistics layer.
What Africa needed underneath it was a credit layer.
Instant Acceptance
On the third of December, 2025, a publication called TechMoran ran the first public coverage of a company called tabb. Lower-case t.
Tabb was registered in Silicon Valley. It was headquartered, operationally, in Nairobi. Its founder was Meshack Alloys.
What tabb was, on paper, was a trade-credit infrastructure network. What tabb does, in practice, takes a moment to explain.
Imagine a small business — say, a contractor in Kiambu County who builds houses. He needs to buy steel rebar from a hardware supplier in Nairobi. Today, he has two options. He pays cash, which strangles his working capital. Or he asks the supplier for credit, which puts the supplier in the de facto banking business — extending loans, chasing payments, eating defaults.
Now imagine he opens an app called tabb. He applies, once, for a credit line. The credit line is not issued by tabb. It is issued by a bank — a partner bank sitting behind the tabb rails.
Once approved, that one credit line can be spent at any supplier on the tabb network. He walks into Doshi, the hardware supplier, and buys his steel. The bank funds the purchase. Doshi gets paid same-day. The contractor pays the bank back on thirty- to ninety-day terms.
The interest rate the contractor pays is zero. The bank earns from underwriting margin. Doshi earns by getting out of the de facto lending business and back to the business of selling steel.
Tabb earns from a small percentage on every transaction — paid by the supplier, in exchange for instant settlement and offloaded credit risk. The same model that built Visa, applied to B2B trade.
Alloys’s own framing, in a December 2025 interview, was that tabb is to B2B credit what Visa is to consumer credit. Closed-loop rails, not a lender.
Crucially, the bank gets something it has never had before in African SME lending. Verified, real-time, line-item purchase data. What was bought. When. From whom. Repaid how. The data that underwrites the next round of credit gets richer with every transaction.
Tabb launched publicly in December 2025. On the twenty-seventh of January, 2026, it signed its first anchor supplier. The supplier was a Kenyan hardware distributor called Doshi — a long-established business selling steel, electrical fittings, water systems, and tools.
Doshi’s director, Hemal, said publicly that working capital had been the single biggest constraint on the growth of his SME customers. Tabb removed that constraint.
The arithmetic of the addressable market is large. The SME financing gap across Africa is estimated at three hundred and fifty billion US dollars. About ninety percent of African businesses are SMEs. About sixty percent of African jobs are in SMEs.
Tabb’s initial wedge is Kenya’s construction and hardware value chain. The roadmap, publicly, is pharmaceuticals, retail, agribusiness, logistics.
The business model is the deliberate opposite of Sendy.
Sendy required physical infrastructure — trucks, motorcycles, warehouses, drivers, fulfilment centres — and absorbed the unit-economic risk of moving every box. Tabb requires no physical infrastructure. It is software, integrated into the checkout flow of suppliers who already have their own infrastructure.
Sendy operated as a principal. It set prices, took payment, owned the risk — which, ultimately, is what made it fail and what made the VAT ruling stick. Tabb operates as a network. Banks lend. Suppliers sell. SMEs buy. Tabb is the wire that connects them and the data that lets the wire keep working.
Sendy needed the next round. Tabb, by design, has a path to profitability built into every transaction.
Every lesson from the Sendy collapse is now wired into the architecture of tabb.
What Africa Needs Underneath
As of the recording of this episode, Mesh Alloys splits his time between Nairobi and the Bay Area. He is the founder and chief executive of tabb. He remains the co-founder and chairman of Boya. Tabb has not publicly disclosed its funding round, but the institutional signal is being assembled in plain sight — the Y Combinator credential, the comeback narrative, the live anchor supplier, the bank partnerships that exist but have not yet been named.
Sendy, the company, remains in administration. Its assets are still being liquidated. Its VAT bill is still owed. Its case law is still being cited in every Kenyan tribunal ruling on platform liability.
The other three Sendy co-founders — Evanson Biwott, Don Okoth, Malaika Judd — have not been publicly tracked into a second act. The two hundred employees who lost their jobs in August 2023 are mostly elsewhere now. Some at competing logistics startups. Some at Boya. Some out of tech entirely.
What Sendy proved is that asset-light marketplaces in fragmented African logistics may not be a venture-scale business, no matter how much capital you throw at them. What tabb is testing is whether the layer underneath logistics — the credit, the working capital, the financial trust between SMEs and the banks that have historically refused to lend to them — is where the real venture-scale opportunity in Africa actually lives.
If tabb works, the bet pays off the way Visa paid off. A small clip of every transaction, on a network that compounds with every new supplier and every new bank.
If it does not work, Alloys becomes, possibly, the most studied African founder of his generation — the man who got to fail in public on the largest scale, and got to come back and try again, with the same customer in mind and a different idea about how to serve them.
Africa has built rails before. M-Pesa was the first rail. M-KOPA was the device-financing rail built on top. Tabb, if it scales, is the trade-credit rail.
Each one starts from the same observation. The continent’s biggest businesses cannot reach Africa’s smallest customers using the infrastructure of the rich world. Somebody has to build the layer underneath.
Mesh Alloys is trying to build the next one.
Every empire has an origin. Sometimes the origin is the company that died on the way. Sometimes the founder is the one who walks out of the wreckage carrying the lesson nobody else picked up.
This is Asili Africa. Every empire has an origin.
Key Takeaways
- The Software Boy from Laiser Hill. The founder of Sendy was born on the first of January, 1987, in Kenya, and learned to code at the age of thirteen at a school called Laiser Hill Academy in the outskirts of Nairobi.
- The Insight Inside the Failure. When a company dies, two things usually happen.
- Instant Acceptance. On the third of December, 2025, a publication called TechMoran ran the first public coverage of a company called tabb.
- What Africa Needs Underneath. As of the recording of this episode, Mesh Alloys splits his time between Nairobi and the Bay Area.
Also available on YouTube — search “Asili Africa” or subscribe to our channel.