OmniRetail, the business-to-business commerce company operating in Nigeria, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, has launched OmniOne, a platform built to help fast-moving consumer goods manufacturers digitise distribution and embed financial services into everyday trade. It extends the company’s existing retailer marketplace, OmniBiz, upstream to manufacturers and formal distributors.
The problem it targets
Across African FMCG markets, traditional trade still dominates. OmniRetail cites NielsenIQ data showing informal trade accounts for about 98% of the retail landscape in markets like Nigeria and Kenya, even as those markets grow at double-digit rates. Yet the distribution layer is highly fragmented: manufacturers rely on chains of distributors, sub-distributors and informal retailers where orders go in by phone and payments scatter across channels, producing delays, blocked working capital and stockouts.
How OmniOne works
OmniOne aggregates activity from OmniBiz into a single interface, giving manufacturers real-time visibility into demand, distributor warehouses and retail sell-through. Distributors can check wallet balances, see pricing, order, pay using wallet funds or approved credit, and track fulfilment. Founder and chief executive Deepankar Rustagi frames the goal as building OmniOne into the operating layer for traditional trade, connecting goods, payments, credit and data that usually sit in separate systems. The platform does not replace OmniBiz, which keeps powering retailer orders, but layers manufacturer and financier access on top of the network and data OmniBiz has built.
Why it matters
OmniRetail is a rare survivor in a category that fell out of investor favour after several African B2B commerce models buckled. Founded in 2019, it raised a $20 million Series A in 2025 co-led by Norfund and Timon Capital, and its network already spans 145 manufacturers, more than 5,800 distributors and over 150,000 retailers across 12 cities in the three countries.
The bet behind OmniOne is that the durable value in African B2B commerce is not the marketplace itself but the infrastructure underneath it: trusted relationships, transaction data and embedded credit. If manufacturers and banks plug into that layer rather than rebuilding it, OmniRetail moves from selling goods to running the rails the trade depends on. Execution across three countries, and disciplined credit, will decide whether the layer holds.
