Embattled online marketplace SkyGarden is set to get a fresh lease of life after being acquired by ‘buy now, pay later’ company LipaLater.
The details of the acquisition are yet to be made public but, it is expected, that an announcement will be made next week.
SkyGarden had sounded the alarm bells of its imminent closure and exit from a market it has operated in since 2017 back in September when it failed to close a round of funding with investors. By that time, SkyGarden had raised over USD 5 million from investors during its lifetime.
Last month, Business Daily reported that the company had managed to evade closure and stay afloat thanks to an unnamed investor. It turns out, that unnamed investor was Lipa Later.
Lipa Later was founded by its CEO Eric Muli in 2017, the same year that SkyGarden was started, to offer credit terms to buyers of consumer goods in Kenya. It has since expanded to other African countries namely Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria and Ghana. It has partnered with the biggest brands in the region to offer their customers products on a ‘buy now, pay later’ basis. Interestingly, one of Lipa Later’s partners has been SkyGarden.
News of the latest update in Kenya’s e-commerce space comes as we just learned that several ex-Jumia senior executives are set to officially unveil their own e-commerce platform next week.
