Alerzo

Last year presented a tough period for African tech startups. Venture capital was hard to bag (as predicted earlier), bridge and down rounds became the norm, and news of fire sales, layoffs and startup closures reverberated across the continent. With the overall amount of VC funding raised in Africa dipping significantly across the year, according to initial reports, after steady growth over the last decade (and the windfall of the previous two years), startups and scale-ups in the continent have suffered…

Alerzo, a Nigerian B2B e-commerce platform that digitizes commerce and payments processes between FMCG suppliers and informal retailers, has laid off 15% of its full-time workforce, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. This is the company’s second round of layoffs in seven months. As a first-party e-commerce business, Alerzo had a headcount of more than 2,000 employees (half of which worked full-time) across Nigeria before the first layoffs last September, which affected 5% of its full-time…