In Africa, the engine of commerce, the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME), is often choked by a crippling lack of working capital, contributing to a massive $350 billion financing gap.
For decades, this conflict has persisted: SMEs have the ambition and the orders, but not the cash to buy the bulk inventory that would make them meet the demand.
This failure has forced suppliers to become reluctant and banks retreat from a market they deem too risky and unpredictable.
The problem is not a lack of entrepreneurs or opportunity. It is a structural breakdown in how credit flows between suppliers, buyers (consumers), and banks.
Enter tabb, a credit-infrastructure startup that is not trying to become another digital lender, but instead to build the invisible financial rails (underlying systems that move money between people, businesses, and banks) that allow trade credit to move safely, efficiently, and at scale.
tabb was founded by Meshack Alloys as a trade credit infrastructure startup aimed at connecting banks, suppliers, and SMEs through embedded financing rails.
Meshack is not new to the entrepreneurial journey, he goes way back, long before tabb. In 2015, he co-founded Sendy, a technology-driven delivery platform that connected businesses with independent transport providers across East Africa.
The company scaled rapidly, serving thousands of merchants beyond East Africa, demonstrating strong market demand for digitized logistics solutions.
However, despite strong market traction, Sendy struggled with unit economics and funding constraints, and eventually ended up in administration. For Alloys, the experience became a turning point. It pushed him to rethink where the real bottlenecks lay, not in moving goods, but in moving money.
This in turn led him to shift focus from physical logistics to building financial infrastructure through tabb. tabb brings in the rails that connect the financier (banks), the supplier (merchants) and the client (consumer) in one symbiotic ecosystem.
The platform operates as a programmable switchboard, embedding the “Pay with tabb” option directly into the supplier’s checkout process.
This means that the platform links the different financial players and controls how money, credit approvals, and transaction data moves between them. This integration thus solves the liquidity and risk problem simultaneously.
When an SME buyer uses their tabb-supported credit line, the supplier receives up to 98% of the payment within 24 hours. This instant settlement removes the credit risk from the supplier’s balance sheet, allowing them to focus on distribution instead of following up with payment.
For the SME, the transaction is deferred, with flexible repayment terms of 30, 60, or 90 days, aligning the payment schedule with their business cycle. Which is good for business.
