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Building the Trade Desk for African commerce

For more than a century, companies that successfully expanded into new markets had an advantage: trading houses. They understood the markets, knew the distributors, financed trade and built the local relationships that turned products into global businesses.

Building that advantage took decades, teams on the ground across multiple markets and extensive local networks. Yala is using technology to make that same advantage accessible to more manufacturers today.

Yala helps manufacturers understand new markets, find the right distributors and work better with the ones they already have. They can manage orders and invoices, collect local payments and offer their distributors financing through Yala.

Our ambition is to give manufacturers the same ability to expand across Africa that the world’s largest companies have built for themselves.

Ultimately, we want to connect African markets to each other and to the world.

About Yala

For press use

Yala is the Trade Desk for manufacturers and distributors expanding across Africa. Yala helps manufacturers understand new markets, find and manage distributors, receive orders, collect local payments and offer financing from one platform.

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Yala is the Trade Desk for African commerce.

Everything manufacturers need to grow across African markets

Market Intelligence

Understand what distributors are buying, where demand is growing and what your products need to succeed in each market.

Find Distributors

Tell Yala what you sell and where you want to grow. Get matched with distributors that fit your requirements.

Manage Orders

Manage distributor orders, invoices and commercial terms from one Trade Desk.

Collect Local Payments

Let distributors pay in supported local currencies and receive settlement in your preferred supported currency.

Trade Finance

Finance eligible distributor purchases so manufacturers can get paid on their terms while distributors get more time to pay.

Aggregate Demand

Combine orders from smaller distributors that can’t meet your MOQ individually, helping you serve more distributors without lowering your minimum order requirements.

Meet the team building Yala

Babatunde Adebajo

Co-founder & CEO

Babatunde spent close to a decade at Union Bank of Nigeria, working across banking, partnerships and value chains. He later worked at AppZone and led commercial growth at Rank across several African markets. At Yala, he brings that experience together to build the commercial and financial infrastructure behind the Trade Desk.

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Adebola Adeniran

Co-founder & CTO

Adebola is a software engineer and technology leader who has built products and engineering teams across Africa, Europe and the US. At Yala, he leads the technology behind the Trade Desk, from distributor matching and market intelligence to the systems that power orders, payments and financing.

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