Eden’s lifea Nigerian startup that is digitizing home services for households across Africa, has raised a $1.4m seed round to increase its market share, bringing its total investment to $2m.
The investment round was led by LocalGlobe with participation from Africa-focused venture capital firms Future Africa, Samurai Incubate, Village Global, Rising Tide Africa and Enza Capital.
Eden Life was founded in 2019 by three former Andela staff members, Nadayar Enegesi, Prosper Otemuyiwa and Silm Momoh, on a pre-seed round of $600,000 from friends and family, to target millennials and the Generation Z who are too busy to juggle household chores. jobs, especially those in the tech space.
According to Enegesi, CEO of Eden Life, who relocated from Canada to co-found Andela, Eden Life was founded to help improve people’s lives even as they grapple with the hectic realities of Lagos. Enagasi himself, who usually worked long hours, had a frustrating experience hiring people to tend to his home.
“It was difficult at first to find trained people who could handle household chores properly,” he told TechCabal in an interview. So he and his co-founders built Eden Life not only to help people manage their household chores, but also to employ well-monitored and well-trained professionals.
Currently, the Eden Life app allows users to outsource their laundry, housekeeping and meal delivery to licensed professionals, known as “gardeners”.
Quality assurance is essential
Quality assurance is a big concern in home service delivery. Enegasi said Eden Life’s quality assurance processes are well documented across all of their verticals: for food, customers need to get delicious, healthy food that is delivered on time; for laundry, customers’ clothes must be clean and delivered within 48 hours with integrity; for cleaning, guest living areas should be cleaned and furnished to taste.
Eden Life’s platform allows its users to continuously provide feedback on all aspects of its services. They then use the data to compile their customers’ preferences and offer them suggestions that rightly serve their various feedbacks.
Eden users pay an average subscription of ₦42,000 ($100) per month to access a daily food delivery plan, weekly cleaning, or bi-weekly laundry plan. Eden Life is said to have over 600 users with a monthly retention rate of 92% and over 70% new users onboarded through referrals. The company said it has provided more than 60,000 services since its launch.
The startup said it will use the new capital to build and scale its internal technology and train and expand its team.
This seed funding will fuel Eden’s vertical integration strategy as it plans to own and manage its entire supply chain and deliver its services without the need for third-party vendors. The startup wants to have physical facilities where chefs prepare meals, laundry is processed quickly, and cleaners are trained to provide high-quality service.
Speaking on their investment in Eden Life, Remus Brett, General Partner of LocalGlobe, said: “We have fallen in love with Eden Life’s vision for the future of home services in Africa. Combining this advantage with a core team with a proven track record of building African technologies to unparalleled levels sets Eden Life on an exciting growth path.
On the expansion, Enegasi said it has received many inquiries from cities across Africa – Nairobi, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Cairo and even Sokoto in the far north of Nigeria. He said, however, that the startup will continue to scale in Lagos, the country’s most populous city, for the time being.
“At the moment our focus is just to make it work very well in Lagos. Lagos is a very difficult city to operate,” Enegasi said. “So we are learning a lot, and as our platform becomes more resilient and in maturity, we can talk about what’s next.”
