Wowzi, a Kenyan startup, has secured new funding to expand the reach of its platform, which turns social media users into brand influencers, to West and Southern Africa — as it capitalizes on the continent’s rising social media usage, driven by the proliferation of smartphones and increasing internet penetration.

Wowzi, which connects social media users with advertisers and provides consumer insights, has raised a total of $3.2 million from investors in recent months, including a recent $2 million seed round led by Africa-focused venture capital firm 4DX Ventures. A $1.2 million pre-seed round preceded this.

To.org, Golden Palm Investments, LoftyInc Capital, Afropreneur Angels, and Future Africa also participated in the seed round. Andela co-founder Christina Sass, as well as former Andela executives Jessica Chervin, Justin Ziegler, and Johnny Falla, who currently serves as Wowzi’s chief development and growth officer, participated in the round.

Wowzi intends to use the new investment to establish operations in Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa, expanding beyond its current physical presence in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. It intends to use these new hubs to expand its operations across the continent.

Wowzi co-founder and CEO Brian Mogeni told TechCrunch, “We are primarily focused on expanding across Africa in 2022 and in other emerging markets globally.”

“We’re also adding new product capabilities and features as we continue to develop our technology and add value to our communities,” he said.

Wowzi enables brands to collaborate with social media users on marketing campaigns. This is a new type of digital marketing that differs from the traditional use of celebrities in marketing campaigns.

Wowzi claims that by utilizing regular internet users, it is able to obtain “more authentic engagements or product endorsements” from people who interact with these brands on a daily basis.

Because the platform is automated, the startup also relieves brands of the stress of managing influencers. Brands filter out their preferred influencer demographic groups based on characteristics such as gender, location, profession, or income levels before posting a campaign.

Wowzi then matches them with the right type of influencers based on their requirements. The brands then narrow their search (based on the content shared or the level of activity) and contact the influencers they want.

“Managing influencers is difficult; from making contact, negotiating, contracting, ensuring content is delivered and posted on time, to following up on payment.” It takes a lot of effort. “We manage the entire process with the brand to ensure its success,” Falla explained.

Wowzi influencers are classified as nano, micro, mega, meta, and super (celebrities), and they promote brands through their social media accounts on platforms such as Tik Tok, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Wowzi, on the other hand, focuses primarily on nano and micro influencers (social media users with less than 10,000 followers).

Anyone with at least 250 (nano influencers) social media connections fits the profile of a Wowzi influencer, but interested candidates must go through several levels of verification before they can start getting gigs.

“Brands want more genuine engagements or endorsements for their products from people who use and love them and can speak about real-world applications.” “Our campaigns show that nano influencers deliver better sales leads because their followers have more trust in them,” Falla told TechCrunch.

“Brands also have access to a community of their most likely customers, which makes campaigns hyper targeted for them as well,” Falla explained.

 

Wowzi co-founders (l-r) Mike Otieno, Hassan Bashir and Brian Mogeni

Wowzi works with creative agencies and brands directly to help them scale their campaigns. It has previously collaborated with Coca-Cola, Netflix, Safaricom, Diageo, P&G, and Absa Bank.

Because the processes are automated, brands receive data that can be used to evaluate the reach of marketing campaigns.

“We provide an extremely detailed reporting dashboard online.” So brands can check in to see exactly what happened, what posts were made by influencers, which ones performed the best, and demographic analytics for people who were actually reached,” Falla explained.

Wowzi was founded in mid-2019 by Mogeni, Hassan Bashir, and Mike Otieno, but the platform went live a day before Kenya’s president imposed the first lockdown last year. As it turned out, a window of opportunity opened up as more brands realized they needed to diversify their marketing efforts as travel and human interaction remained limited.

To date, the startup has worked with 200 brands, completed over 15,000 campaigns, and delivered over 200,000 paid gigs. Wowzi has more than doubled in size in the last year.

Recently, brands have been able to post market research jobs that include the participation of influencers in polls or surveys. This is part of Wowzi’s strategy to transition from an influencer marketing platform to a jobs aggregator.

“We recently launched a market intelligence service that enables the same brands, SMEs, or development agencies to pull information from their focal segments in a faster, targeted, and richer format,” Mogeni explained.

Wowzi is now targeting over 1 million job openings in the near future as it establishes a strong pan-African presence. This goal is attainable for the startup, which has successfully run campaigns in several African markets, including Mauritius, Mozambique, Zambia, and Cameroon.

“In fact, we recently had our first engagement in Cameroon after Netflix asked us to work with them in an additional eight countries.” As a result, we’ve seen that we can scale easily, even without the need for a physical presence,” Falla explained.

According to the 2021 GSMA Mobile Economy report, 303 million people, or about 28 percent of the population, are connected to the mobile internet in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is expected to increase to around 40% of the population by 2025, providing a larger market for internet-based businesses like Wowzi.