Sky.Garden was a Kenyan e-commerce platform founded by Martin Majlund, a Danish entrepreneur, that positioned itself as the homegrown alternative to Jumia Kenya and the foreign-backed marketplaces that dominated African online retail. Launched in 2017, Sky.Garden aimed to connect Kenyan small businesses and individual sellers with online buyers through a mobile-first marketplace that emphasised local products and affordable delivery. The company raised approximately $4 million in funding before shutting down in 2023, becoming one of the most discussed e-commerce failures in Silicon Savannah.
Majlund's thesis was that existing e-commerce platforms in Kenya had been built on imported models - replicating Amazon's warehouse-heavy, logistics-intensive approach in a market where the infrastructure to support it did not exist. Sky.Garden took a lighter approach, operating as a marketplace without holding inventory. Sellers listed products on the platform, and Sky.Garden facilitated transactions and coordinated delivery through third-party logistics partners. The model reduced capital requirements compared to Jumia Kenya's warehouse operations, but it also meant less control over the customer experience - delivery times were unpredictable, and product quality varied widely.
The platform gained traction among Kenyan small traders, particularly those selling consumer electronics, fashion, and household goods. Sky.Garden's marketing emphasised its Kenyan identity, contrasting itself with Jumia (Nigerian-German origins) and Kilimall (Chinese-founded). The company attracted sellers who had previously operated through social media - Facebook groups, Instagram pages, and WhatsApp catalogues - by offering a more structured marketplace with payment integration via M-Pesa.
But Sky.Garden faced the same structural challenges that plagued every e-commerce venture in Kenya. Online retail penetration remained below 1 percent of total retail spending, meaning the addressable market was far smaller than venture investors typically required. Most Kenyan consumers preferred to buy goods in physical markets where they could inspect items, negotiate prices, and avoid delivery fees. Trust was a persistent barrier - stories of wrong sizes, fake products, and non-delivery circulated widely on Kenyan social media, dampening enthusiasm for online shopping.
The company's $4 million in funding was modest by startup standards, leaving limited runway for the expensive work of customer acquisition, seller onboarding, and logistics coordination. When the global venture capital downturn hit African startups in 2022-2023, Sky.Garden found itself unable to raise additional capital. The company shut down operations in 2023, joining Copia Global and Sendy on the growing list of well-known Kenyan tech companies that collapsed during the funding winter.
Sky.Garden's failure reinforced a hard lesson in Kenyan e-commerce: building an online marketplace is not primarily a technology problem. The binding constraints are consumer behaviour, trust, logistics infrastructure, and unit economics - none of which can be solved by software alone. The companies that have gained modest traction in Kenyan e-commerce have done so by focusing on narrow verticals or B2B models rather than attempting to build a general-purpose consumer marketplace.
See Also
Sources
- Jackson, Tom. "Sky.Garden Shuts Down After Failing to Raise New Funding." Disrupt Africa, 2023.
- Kazeem, Yinka. "Why E-Commerce Keeps Failing in Africa." Rest of World, August 2023.
- Bright, Jake. "Africa's E-Commerce Startups Are Struggling to Survive the Funding Drought." TechCrunch, 2023.