Jumia

E-commerceNigeria

New to Unitard

📉 Public < $1B

Peak $5 BillionRecorded estimate

~-84%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2016
📈
Peak valuation
$5 Billion ’21
💔
Became a Unitard
2022
💸
Last valuation estimate
~$800M

Current status

Listed on NYSE (JMIA)

The rise & fall

7 moments · 2012–2025

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2012

Founded in Lagos

Rocket Internet incubates an 'Amazon of Africa' spanning e-commerce, payments and logistics.

Wikipedia

2016

Africa's first startup unicorn

A funding round with global banks and telecoms on board values Jumia above $1B — a continental first.

Reuters

Apr 2019

First African tech IPO on the NYSE

Shares surge after the debut; a bruising short-seller report follows within weeks.

CNBC

Feb 2021

The peak: $65.51 a share$5B

Lockdown-era e-commerce enthusiasm carries the ADSs to an all-time high — roughly a $5B valuation.

Macrotrends

2021–23

Losses and retreats

Persistent losses force exits from several markets as growth slows.

Reuters

2022

Slips out of the club

The post-pandemic selloff drags the market cap below $1B — where it has hovered, volatile, ever since.

Macrotrends

2022–25

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2022–25

Glassdoor reviews sketched the austerity years from Lagos to Nairobi to Cairo: staff described below-market pay with raises and bonuses frozen through the cost cuts, roles shifted onto rolling short-term contracts, and repeated restructurings and leadership reshuffles that kept teams churning.

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Jumia, often called 'the Amazon of Africa,' is a pan-African e-commerce, payments and logistics company that became the continent's first startup unicorn and, in April 2019, the first African tech firm to list on the New York Stock Exchange.

Its stock peaked at $65.51 in February 2021 — an ~$5B valuation — before years of heavy losses, retreats from several markets and slowing growth dragged its market cap to roughly $0.8B by 2026.

Source: Macrotrends / stockanalysis / NYSE (pan-African e-commerce, the 'Amazon of Africa'; first African tech firm to IPO on the NYSE, Apr 2019; ADS peaked at $65.51 in Feb 2021 for an ~$5B market cap; persistent losses; market cap ~$0.8B in 2026, volatile around $1B)

Founders & leadership

Francis Dufay
CEO (current, since 2022)
Still there — Chief Executive OfficerLinkedIn ↗
Jeremy Hodara
co-founder & co-CEO 2012-Nov 2022 (ex-McKinsey)
Now Co-Founder at EasyGardenLinkedIn ↗
Sacha Poignonnec
co-founder & co-CEO 2012-Nov 2022 (ex-McKinsey)
Now Chairman of the Board at GeevLinkedIn ↗
Tunde Kehinde
co-founder (left in 2015)
Now Guest Lecturer at Howard UniversityLinkedIn ↗
Raphael Kofi Afaedor
co-founder (left in 2015)
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