Need a goat in a hurry? This Angolan start-up will deliver it to your door – still bleating

The on-demand delivery segment is hotting up in Africa, with Spanish company Glovo commencing operations in Kenya and Morocco recently and Angolan player Tupuca exhibiting strong growth. Based in Luanda, the latter was founded by four friends in 2015 and now has 140 drivers making 17,000 deliveries a month, with an average order value of around USD40, the Economist reports.
“We realised that people living in Luanda had a difficult time going around to pick up food and other essentials … [but] many people were sceptical about the readiness of the market,” Tupuca CEO Erickson Mvezi commented. Apart from delivering restaurant orders to consumers, Tupuca also delivers groceries from supermarkets, medications from pharmacies, and even live animals (pigs, goats, sheep, chickens and ducks) for slaughter.
For the latter, Tupuca has teamed up with Roque Online, a startup named after Mercado Roque Santeiro, an informal market in Luanda that was shut down by the government in 2011. Roque Online has a team of pickers who select the livestock and take it to a Tupuca driver, who then delivers it to the customer. Mvezi claims service is “breaking down barriers between the informal and formal markets.”
As a result of inquiries from investors and entrepreneurs, Tupuca is considering the possibility of franchising its brand in such markets as Congo Republic and Mozambique.
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