Afrikrea is returning under its original name to mark ten years since its founding, with a new structure that splits the business in two. Afrikrea itself becomes the consumer facing marketplace where shoppers browse and buy African and diaspora made fashion, art, and crafts, while ANKA Pay and ANKA Ship continue on as business to business software handling payments and logistics for merchants. CEO Matilda Ceesay framed the move as a return to a founding identity, saying Afrikrea is going back to the name that carries the company’s original point of view, a home for African and diaspora creators whose work deserves to be seen, valued, and built into enduring businesses. Read on its own, that sounds like a company confidently revisiting its roots on a happy anniversary. Read against what actually happened to get here, it’s a considerably more complicated story.
Afrikrea launched in 2016 in Côte d’Ivoire, founded by Moulaye Taboure, Abdoul Kadry Diallo, and Luc Perussault-Diallo, as a straightforward marketplace connecting African creators to buyers around the world. It built real traction over the following years, partnering with DHL on logistics in 2019 and eventually processing tens of millions of dollars in transactions across dozens of African countries and well over a hundred international markets. In March 2024, the company rebranded entirely from Afrikrea to Anka Marketplace, a deliberate identity change meant to position it as broader commerce infrastructure rather than a niche fashion platform. Two months later, in May 2024, the company shut down the original Afrikrea marketplace itself, citing inflation, rising costs, and persistent payment challenges, a move that at the time left outside observers unsure whether it marked the end of the business entirely or simply a strategic narrowing toward its newer software tools.
It turned out to be neither, at least not immediately. Under Taboure’s continued leadership, the renamed Anka pivoted fully into a software as a service model combining marketplace tools, payments, and logistics, and by the company’s own account to TechCabal, it quadrupled its payment volume and reached breakeven, with revenue reportedly hitting $4.1 million in 2024. That recovery didn’t hold. By October 2025, Anka’s financial position had deteriorated badly enough that the company was sold in what TechMoran directly described as a bankruptcy deal, with people familiar with the matter citing market turbulence and cross-border cost pressures behind the parent company’s insolvency. New York based Global Shop Group, led by Gambian born former Nike, Ralph Lauren, and Boston Consulting Group executive Matilda Ceesay, acquired the distressed business for an undisclosed amount. All three original founders exited entirely as part of the deal, with Ceesay stepping directly into the leadership role they left behind.
That’s the piece missing from this week’s celebratory framing. The Afrikrea brand being relaunched today isn’t being revived by the people who built it over the preceding decade. It’s being repositioned by a new owner who acquired the company’s assets and brand name out of financial distress less than a year ago, and who is now choosing to time a rebrand announcement to coincide with what would have been the original company’s tenth birthday. None of that makes the relaunch illegitimate or the strategy behind it wrong. Splitting a consumer marketplace from B2B infrastructure tools is a perfectly sound structural decision, and Ceesay’s stated commitment to the platform, along with real numbers she’s citing, more than $30 million generated for creators over the marketplace’s history and a footprint spanning 94 countries of creators and 185 markets of buyers, suggests genuine intent to build something durable rather than simply asset strip a distressed acquisition.
But the framing matters for how seriously to take the anniversary narrative itself. A brand returning to its original name a year after new owners bought it out of bankruptcy is a fundamentally different story than a company confidently revisiting its founding identity after a decade of continuous operation under the same leadership. The former is a genuine second act, worth watching to see whether new ownership and fresh capital can succeed where the original team ultimately couldn’t sustain the business through African e-commerce’s well documented structural headwinds, thin banking penetration, costly cross-border logistics, and currency volatility chief among them. The latter would just be a marketing refresh. This is clearly the former, and Index Prima readers evaluating what this relaunch actually signals about the durability of African e-commerce platforms should weigh it as such.
