Pre-Seed Investment Presentation
jon@pallitech.com
The Context
Thousands of trucks, tuk-tuks, and bicycles. Millions of neighborhood shops. 80% of consumer goods reach people through this network. Real businesses, real people, real money.
And yet, businesses in this supply chain fight every day to survive.
The Problem
Suppliers go blind the moment a truck leaves the depot.
Agents start from scratch at every stop.
Retailers wait and guess.
Operations nobody can see are operations nobody can manage.
The Graveyard
Shut down 2024. Absorbed margin risk of a commodity market. As volume scaled, unit economics collapsed.
Owned the farms, warehouses, fleet. Every asset became a target. Every failure hit the balance sheet. Restructuring.
Shut down in five markets. More volume required more subsidy, not less.
In most markets, scale generates efficiency. Here, it multiplies exposure: more trucks, more invisible transactions, more risk concentrated on a single balance sheet.
The Approach
Informal retail is not a bug in the system. It's the system.
The companies that failed treated it as something to replace, formalize, or control. Palli is built to coordinate it.
The Industry Approach
Track them. Control them. Design them out of the system wherever possible.
Palli's Approach
Treat agents as the primary user, not the primary risk.
Accept or decline orders. Protect customer lists. Using the platform makes them better at their job.
The Platform
Supplier
Orders, vehicle movement, and delivery status in real time. Fulfillment tracked per customer.
Agent
Route and orders waiting at the start of the day. Earnings tied to completions. Customer relationships protected.
Retailer
Alerts when supply is nearby. Orders secured through voice or text. No app. English or local language.
Visibility is the byproduct of coordination, not built from compliance.
No trucks. No warehouses. No inventory.
Physical risk stays with the suppliers who already own it. Management stays with those on the ground.
What holds the system together is not ownership. It's information.
Early Evidence
82 retailers reordered. Agents brought in their own customers, unprompted.
The Defensible Asset
Google has roads. Palli has what moves on them.
Business Model
Today · Coordination
Service fee per completed delivery, paid by suppliers.
Revenue scales with network volume. The supplier's cost is proportional to their success. No fee without a confirmed delivery.
Next · Visibility
Manufacturers and global brands pay for the view into the last mile.
What sells, where, at what price, to whom. A dataset that doesn't exist today — generated as a byproduct of the coordination layer.
Market Opportunity
The revenue opportunity is serving the transactions already happening, currently invisible and uncoordinated.
The Team
Started in Kampala with a hypothesis about pharmaceutical credit. Invalidated in one day.
Wrong marketPivoted to FMCG, issued $400K in credit. More capital increased risk without improving visibility.
Capital ≠ visibilityBuilt payments to $700K/month in volume. High volume still obscured operations.
Volume ≠ clarityOnly when we started mapping actual routes did the picture come clear: vehicles going dark, orders unaccounted for, agents with no record of what they sold or to whom.
Coordination is the productCEO
10 years with small business owners across Africa. Head of Product, Navio. First software PM, Counsyl (acq. Myriad). Founder, Axena ($1M+ revenue, Asia Pacific).
CTO
Built a savings co-op with $1M+ in assets. Head of Systems Engineering, PSI. Founder, Nymbow Uganda.
Six people. Based in Kampala. 14 distribution partners. 80 vehicles. 5,000+ outlets tracked daily.
The Ask
2,500 active retailers
Transaction fee revenue live
Delivery compliance above 90%
Multiple suppliers per market
Expansion beyond Kampala
First paid manufacturer engagement
At 2,500 retailers across multiple suppliers, the dataset tells manufacturers something they've never known: exactly what's happening at the last mile.
Jon Brown
jon@pallitech.com
+256 783 672 647 · +1 951 572 2554
A reliable network carries better goods. Not just cheaper ones.