Plentywaka founder Onyeka Akumah on African startups and global expansion

Plentywaka wants to change the way Africans move. It’s starting with one of the busiest cities on the continent.

The startup, a ride-share and bus-booking platform, is based in Lagos, the Nigerian city where 20 million people and 45% of the country’s skilled workforce live. The public transportation system strains under the weight of 14 million commuters who use it daily.

Relying on the public bus can be more than unpredictable — it also can be dangerous, according to Onyeka Akumah, co-founder and CEO of Plentywaka. The buses are often old, in disrepair and packed beyond safe limits; traffic congestion turns what should be a 30-minute commute into a three-hour journey.

Plentywaka, a combination of English and Nigerian that means “plenty movement,” was founded in 2019. While it’s still young, the startup has big plans to ameliorate the public transport infrastructure in Africa and beyond. (Since this interview posted, Plentywaka has rebranded to Treepz.”)

Plentywaka has two models. “Daily Waka” offers riders in a city fixed daily routes from bus stop to bus stop. Riders can view the schedule of buses, how many seats are available and reserve seats via the app, which tracks the movements of SUVs, minivans, vans and buses driven by gig workers, also known as “heroes.” When the bus arrives, riders can check in with a QR code, and when they hop off, the app automatically charges the rider via a wallet system.

“Travel Waka” is a newer model that offers interstate travel. It basically serves as a booking engine for other bus companies that offer city-to-city services.

In March this year, Plentywaka was accepted into the Techstars Toronto accelerator program, securing funding as it looks toward global expansion across Africa and into Canada. Just this month, the company also announced expansion plans into Ghana via an acquisition of Star Bus.

Akumah talks us through what the TechStars funding means to Plentywaka, the startup landscape in Africa and tips for African startups looking for investors.

The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity.

Before founding Plentywaka, you were the CEO of Farmcrowdy, another startup that connected investors to farmers via a digital platform. What was the impetus for starting a second business? Are you a serial entrepreneur, or do you plan on sticking with this one?

I was the CEO of Farmcrowdy until the end of May this year, but I’ve handed it over to my other co-founder who is now the CEO, so I’m fully focused on Plentywaka now. We started Plentywaka in January 2019. I was flying back from Qatar, where I spoke at an event, and landed in Lagos around 8:15 a.m. that day. I had to be at a meeting by 10 a.m., and going through traffic in Lagos is a pain. The state has 20 million people and everybody’s rushing to work, so I had to abandon my car and take two bikes to make that meeting. When that was done, to make another meeting, I had to take a boat ride across the lagoon. I tweeted about it saying, “Today, I have flown, I have used two bikes and now I’m on a boat ride. This is the life of an entrepreneur in Lagos.”

What I wasn’t prepared for was the shock my colleagues gave me when they said we should experiment with taking the bus. I hadn’t taken the bus in about 15 years, and I took that trip and had a panic attack. I never knew how frightened I would be getting on a 30-year-old bus with torn-out parts and worn-out chairs. I literally had to hold one of the doors throughout the trip from falling off. That was the day the concept of Plentywaka started.

Millions of people have to commute on a daily basis on public transportation, and for most of them, this is the only way they can get to work. Uber has about 18,000 drivers in Nigeria, but they can only service about 1% of the population. We wanted to give people a better way to commute with predictability, where they can know when the bus will get here, the certainty that they will have a seat in a vehicle, that it’s a decent vehicle and a safe one where you can bring your laptop. Those are the things we said we wanted to change.

You raised pre-seed funding about a year ago, and just this week closed a $1.2 million seed round. What do you plan to do with the money?

We have a series of KPIs that we want to hit. We want to get to about 500,000 app downloads, a million rides on the app, have 200,000 active users of the app, and 2,500 heroes, or drivers, on the app. We are also planning on expanding outside Nigeria to Uganda, as well as to Ghana with our acquisition of Star Bus.

You also have plans to bring Plentywaka to Canada. Did you think global expansion would be happening so soon after starting this company?

We have the approval to get some licenses to operate out of the Toronto area, but because of COVID, we can’t get a team in there to start thinking about operations, so we’re looking at next year to kick that off and think it will be roughly about 2023 before we can begin.

In the meantime, our focus is Africa and how fast we can take this into other African markets. Our focus is on how to build this into the largest shared mobility startup on the continent. We’re looking to go next into West Africa first, and that will be Ghana and then Gambia. In East Africa, we’re considering Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, maybe Rwanda and Kenya, and then we go to South Africa, one or two countries there. And then, North Africa, we will look at maybe Algeria, Morocco and Egypt. The order will go from West Africa, then east, then south and north.

What are you getting from the TechStars investment? How has that helped you advance your business?

TechStars has helped us remodel our business and see the bigger scope of how we can grow this business. They allowed us to focus on the products we’re building, like Daily Waka and Travel Waka, and the opportunities that come from those.

It also gave us leverage to connect with important stakeholders who have done this in the past, so we’re able to meet a couple of mentors who can guide us through, people who may have done something directly in mobility, or they have done something in transportation or something in tech, and so we’re able to just get some feedback from them on how we can remodel our business, how can we improve the business. And then the managing director of the TechStars Toronto class, Neal Sales-Griffin, was a strong believer in Plentywaka. He talked a lot about the business and so I think that endorsement from him, and how much he drove Plentywaka as a major platform you should pay serious attention to, was something that was very beneficial.

Also, TechStars was pretty much like going through a school of entrepreneurship in three months, and it was good value for us at the end of the day beyond the access to investors, beyond access to the network.

Obviously, just getting more people carpooling is good for the CO2 levels in the city. Is Plentywaka planning to implement zero-emissions vehicles?

There’s a bus operator that has just introduced an entire fleet of EVs, and that’s very encouraging. It will be good to see how much value that creates. I also know maybe the first indigenous manufacturer in Nigeria, we partnered with him last year, and he mentioned to us that he was gonna focus on building electric vehicles for transportation. So I think a lot of attention has been paid to it. I know we continue to struggle with energy to power our systems in Africa, but I think people are finding ways to do things from an electric standpoint, and then conserving energy to get some value from it. I think we will get some experimental success in the next two, three years, and maybe some major scale successes in the next five to 10 years.

It seems that different regions produce startups that approach problems differently. I’m sure Lagos doesn’t look at transportation in the same way that Silicon Valley does. How do you think that Nigerian, or even African, startups approach the commuting problem differently, if at all?

I think smart entrepreneurs have found ways to discover solutions to problems facing Africans from a Western perspective, and found ways to customize the solution for Africans, rather than dedicating the solution to Africans. So, what I mean is, you get to see a solution that works in the U.S., and you think that there’s a market for it in Nigeria. In the past, many people have tried and failed to take that blueprint from the U.S. and replicate the same thing in Nigeria. What they are now doing is they take the solution in the U.S. and try to find a way of customizing it to fit the African context, bringing in elements of understanding that this is how Africans do their own thing.

The trust system you have in the U.S., you wouldn’t find that in Africa. The infrastructure system that makes Amazon successful would have failed if we had tried to replicate it here. So I think smarter entrepreneurs in the startup world have been able to customize tech for the African narrative to get the African consumer to use it. They start to see the value and get educated on the product, and then you have adoption that resembles what you’d see in the U.S.

I’ve also seen overtime entrepreneurs that have gone through maybe joining a company in 2000 or many years ago and watching it grow into a huge monster that’s now doing amazing work. Those people have come out and started their own businesses. So there’s a third generation of entrepreneurs and that’s where I find myself today, and we have a lot more experience. We’re seeing people paying attention to things as simple as stock option pools, as simple as contracts and investment acquisitions; we’re finding better ways now of negotiating deals to get the right kind of funding into our businesses compared to what you had back in 2010.

So I think the experience and the ecosystem are getting a lot more mature. The investors are having bigger tickets, they are expanding how much you can invest in an African startup, because they are beginning to see exits, and I think gradually we’re seeing the ecosystem mature into something that makes it exciting for everyone.

Do most of the investors in African companies come from Africa or do they come from abroad? Or is it a combination?

I think it’s a combination. The best thing an African-based or Nigerian-based startup can do is to get an African- or Nigerian-based investor first to give some validation to the process. I have raised funds in the U.S., and one of the things that I’m asked most of the time is: Who in Africa has already invested? What investors are really asking for is: Who can I follow up with so I can do my due diligence to get the kind of results that I’d get if I were on the ground? So I think it’s now a combination of both, and founders could stand to get some local investors before looking for U.S.- or European-based investors.

Where do you hope to see Plentywaka a year from now?

A year from now, Plentywaka will have been in three countries in West Africa, and piloting in one or two countries in East Africa. We’ll have reached our KPIs I mentioned earlier — 1 million rides, 2,500 heroes on the platform, maybe we would have crossed several hundreds of thousands of app downloads.

Plentywaka will become a household name in Nigeria; it will be synonymous [with] shared mobility. We won’t just be called the largest shared mobility platform, but we will be referred to as No. 1 because of the impact we have in millions of people’s lives that are using our platform on a daily basis.

It’s hard to predict what will happen with the pandemic, but if everything stays normal, we want to be back at the table around March or April next year to raise our Series A round, and to keep championing the growth of this business to other markets. I’m quite excited about the opportunity and quite excited about the market, and seeing how our heroes are excited about first the money they’re making, then they get excited about the impact. And that makes me happy, because ultimately if I continue to create value for millions of people, it will translate to value also for everybody involved in Plentywaka. So that’s where my joy is gonna come from; that’s what we will be focused on in one year’s time.

Editor’s note: Plentywaka announced a rebrand to Treepz on Thursday after this article was posted.