Kaymu

» see kaymu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

there was a company in Berlin whose whole business was making copies. Rocket Internet would find something that worked in America, an Amazon or an eBay, and build a near-identical version aimed at a market the original had not bothered with yet, then race to get big enough to sell or to scare the original into buying them. Kaymu was one of those copies. i knew the machine long before i knew this particular thing it stamped out, because half the startups you read about that decade turned out to have come off the same line.

Kaymu itself was the eBay copy, pointed at the emerging markets. it opened in 2013 in Nigeria and Pakistan on the same launch, a place to buy and sell the things people needed, phones and secondhand clothes among them, the small commerce of people who were getting online for the first time. within about two years it was running in more than thirty countries, most of Africa and a good stretch of South Asia. it was not sold to me, obviously. it was built for Lagos and Karachi, cities whose internet was arriving right then, on the kind of connection Turkey had had a decade earlier.

~ the record ~

~ the clone factory ~

to understand Kaymu you have to understand what made it, because it barely had a life apart from that. Rocket Internet, run by the Samwer brothers, treated startups like a production line, spin up the same proven idea in a dozen countries at once and see which ones caught. it is easy to be snobbish about the copying, and plenty of people were. but in markets with no Amazon and no eBay coming, the copy was the thing that actually showed up. Kaymu brought a working online marketplace to places that did not have one, which is not nothing, even if the reason for it was a spreadsheet in Berlin.

~ the fall ~

the trouble with emerging-market e-commerce in those years was that the hard parts were all offline. a lotta customers had no card, so everything ran on cash paid to a courier at the door, and half of them changed their mind when it arrived. addresses were vague and the roads were bad, and a courier could not always find you. Kaymu burned money fighting all of it, the way its whole cohort did, and the marketplace model, buyers and sellers Rocket did not control, was harder to make honest than a straight shop where the company owned the stock.

~ how the name went away ~

Kaymu did not fail with a bang. in 2016 Rocket Internet did what Rocket Internet does, it reorganized. the Asian operations were pulled into Daraz, the South Asian marketplace it also owned, and the African ones were rebranded as Jumia Market under its bigger African bet. the Kaymu name, live in more than thirty countries a year before, simply stopped being printed. it was not killed so much as absorbed, its users and its listings poured into other logos. a template does not get a funeral. it gets superseded by the next version.

~ the legacy ~

the afterlife is where the story turns. Jumia, the African company Kaymu's markets fed into, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019, the first African tech company to ring that bell, and for one strange day it was worth billions before the numbers came back to earth. Daraz, the Asian side, was bought by Alibaba and is still the biggest online marketplace across Pakistan and Bangladesh today. Kaymu the name is gone and mostly forgotten. but the two big things it dissolved into are still standing, which is a rare ending for anything on this site.

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