Alerzo, the B2B e-commerce startup that once delivered goods to thousands of small retailers across Southwest Nigeria, is selling off its fleet of buses, motorcycles, and other vehicles. The company is liquidating assets as it struggles with a ₦4.38 billion debt to Moniepoint Microfinance Bank, one of Nigeria’s most valuable fintechs.
A Federal High Court in Lagos froze Alerzo’s assets three weeks ago after the company defaulted on a ₦5 billion loan it took in January 2025 for working capital. The asset sale includes the buses, dispatch motorcycles, and shuttles the company used to run its delivery operations — the physical infrastructure that was supposed to be Alerzo’s competitive moat. Selling the delivery fleet means Alerzo can no longer operate, even if it wanted to.
For employees, this likely means more layoffs or a complete shutdown. For founders Opaleye Adewale Adesina (Alerzo’s Managing Director) and the three personal guarantors who co-signed the loan, it means potential personal bankruptcy. And for Nigeria’s B2B e-commerce sector — which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars on the promise that digitizing informal retail distribution would unlock enormous value — it means reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: the model doesn’t work.
The Loan That Killed Alerzo
Court documents filed by Moniepoint paint a picture of a company that was already in distress when it sought emergency financing.
On January 20, 2025, Alerzo’s board passed a resolution to apply for a ₦5 billion ($3.3 million) working capital loan from Moniepoint. The loan was approved for 18 months, with provisions allowing Moniepoint to recall the full amount immediately in the event of default. The terms were standard for commercial lending: monthly interest payments, collateral requirements, and personal guarantees from Alerzo’s leadership.
Thirteen months later, Alerzo had repaid only ₦619 million, leaving an outstanding balance of ₦4.38 billion ($2.9 million). That’s an 88% default rate. By December 2025, Moniepoint issued a formal demand letter. When Alerzo failed to respond, Moniepoint filed suit in Federal High Court Lagos on December 4, 2025.
On January 30, 2026, Justice Daniel Osiagor granted Moniepoint’s application for a Mareva injunction — a court order that freezes a debtor’s assets to prevent them from being moved or sold before a judgment is reached. The order restrains all Nigerian banks from releasing funds or assets belonging to Alerzo, its Managing Director Opaleye Adewale Adesina, the three personal guarantors (Opaleye Bukola Modinat, Dauda Hakeem Omotayo Taiwo), and the Singapore-based entity Alerzo Pte Limited — up to the value of ₦4.38 billion.
The court also ordered banks to disclose all account balances within seven days and authorized substituted service (posting notices at defendants’ last known addresses) after Moniepoint reported that the founders were no longer accessible at their registered addresses.
That last detail is telling. When founders go into hiding from their lenders, the company is finished.
How Alerzo Got Here: The B2B E-Commerce Model That Never Worked
Alerzo launched in 2018 as one of Nigeria’s most promising B2B commerce startups, raising $10.5 million in Series A in February 2022 led by Nosara Capital, with participation from Capria Ventures, SOSV, and others. An earlier seed round brought the total raised to over $20 million.
The company’s model was familiar to anyone tracking Africa’s B2B boom: connect manufacturers and distributors directly to small retailers (the kiosks, provision stores, and corner shops that dominate Nigerian retail), cutting out middlemen and promising faster delivery at lower costs. Alerzo would aggregate demand from thousands of small shops, negotiate bulk discounts from suppliers, and deliver inventory directly to retailers using its own logistics fleet.
The value proposition was compelling. Nigeria has over 5 million small retail shops that collectively generate hundreds of billions of naira in annual sales. These shops typically source inventory from distributors who charge high mark-ups and offer poor credit terms. If Alerzo could offer better prices, faster delivery, and flexible credit, it could capture enormous market share.
The problem, as Alerzo and every other B2B e-commerce startup in Africa has discovered, is that the margins don’t work.
Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) — soap, cooking oil, snacks, beverages — have razor-thin margins, typically 2-5%. The cost of delivering those goods to thousands of small shops scattered across cities with terrible infrastructure is enormous: warehouse rent, truck fuel, driver salaries, inventory financing, spoilage losses. By the time you account for all those costs, there’s no margin left. You’re burning cash on every delivery, hoping that scale will eventually bring profitability.
It never does.
Wasoko (formerly Sokowatch) and MaxAB merged in 2023 after raising over $240 million combined and are now pivoting to fintech because e-commerce doesn’t generate the margins needed to service debt or deliver venture returns. MarketForce shut down its B2B e-commerce platform RejaReja in 2024 after confronting “perfect competition” — too many players chasing the same low-margin business. Sabi, Nigeria’s B2B hopeful, pivoted away from retail distribution entirely and is now focused on commodity exports.
The sector isn’t growing. It’s contracting. And Alerzo, which borrowed ₦5 billion to stay alive long enough to reach profitability, is now the highest-profile casualty yet.
The Asset Sale: Liquidation, Not Restructuring
According to reports from Technext24, Alerzo is actively selling its fleet of buses, motorcycles, and delivery vehicles. The company had built a logistics network spanning Ibadan, Lagos, and other Southwest Nigerian cities, with hundreds of vehicles on the road delivering inventory to retail partners.
That fleet was Alerzo’s operational core. Without it, the company cannot fulfill orders. The fact that Alerzo is selling those assets — rather than restructuring debt, raising emergency capital, or seeking strategic acquisition — suggests the company is either:
- Liquidating entirely to pay back as much of the Moniepoint debt as possible before formal insolvency proceedings begin, or
- Desperately raising cash to avoid personal bankruptcy for the founders and guarantors, who are on the hook for the full ₦4.38 billion under the terms of their personal guarantees.
Neither scenario ends with Alerzo continuing operations.
Social media reactions show frustration from people who worked with or benefited from Alerzo’s services. One comment noted the company helped small businesses by painting shops and marketing Alerzo’s brand, employing many people in the process. The collapse shows the harsh reality of B2B trade in Nigeria: companies compete by moving high volumes quickly, which requires heavy investment in transportation and storage. But profits are minuscule, making it nearly impossible to sustain operations when the economy deteriorates or growth stalls.
The Founders Who Went Missing
One of the most striking details in the court filings is that Moniepoint’s lawyers reported they could not locate the founders to serve them court papers. The court granted substituted service, meaning notices will be posted at the defendants’ last known addresses and published in newspapers — the legal equivalent of shouting into the void.
Opaleye Adewale Adesina, Alerzo’s Managing Director and the face of the company, is named as the second defendant. Three personal guarantors — Opaleye Bukola Modinat, Dauda Hakeem Omotayo Taiwo — are also defendants, meaning they personally guaranteed the ₦5 billion loan and are liable if Alerzo can’t pay.
The fifth defendant, Alerzo Pte Limited, is a Singapore-based entity, presumably used for international fundraising or offshore structuring. The court has authorized service via courier to Singapore.
Founders going into hiding when their company implodes is not uncommon, especially when personal guarantees mean they face potential asset seizure, bankruptcy, or even criminal prosecution if lenders pursue fraud charges. But it’s a damning indictment of how badly things have collapsed. Responsible founders restructure, negotiate, and take accountability. Founders who disappear have run out of options.
What This Means for Nigeria’s B2B Sector
Alerzo’s collapse is not an isolated event. It’s the culmination of structural problems that have plagued Nigerian B2B e-commerce since the sector’s venture capital boom began in 2019.
The core problem is unit economics. You cannot build a sustainable business on 2-5% margins when your operational costs are 10-15%. The venture capital that funded the growth was supposed to buy time for companies to reach the scale where margins would improve through operational efficiency, automation, and negotiating power with suppliers. That scale never materialized.
Part of the problem is competition. When Jumia, Konga, Wasoko, MaxAB, Alerzo, MarketForce, Sabi, TradeDepot, and a dozen other players are all fighting for the same small retailers, the only way to win market share is to offer unsustainably low prices. That’s a race to the bottom, and everyone loses.
Part of the problem is infrastructure. Nigeria’s roads are terrible. Power is unreliable. Logistics costs are astronomical. Cold chain infrastructure barely exists. These are not problems that venture-backed startups can solve. They require government investment in public goods. Until that happens, the cost of delivering goods across Nigerian cities will remain prohibitively expensive.
And part of the problem is credit risk. Many B2B platforms extended credit to retailers to drive adoption. But when the economy sours — as it has in Nigeria, with inflation above 30% and the naira depreciating — default rates spike. Retailers can’t pay their invoices. The B2B platforms can’t pay their suppliers. And everyone ends up in court.
Alerzo’s failure sends a clear message to the venture capital firms still deploying capital into African B2B e-commerce: the model is broken. Pure-play logistics and distribution doesn’t generate venture-scale returns. The only survivors will be companies that pivot to higher-margin services — fintech, advertising, SaaS — and use logistics as a Trojan horse to build customer relationships.
Which is exactly what Wasoko-MaxAB, TradeDepot, and others are now doing. Alerzo waited too long.
The Verdict: A Cautionary Tale, Not an Outlier
Alerzo’s collapse — ₦4.38 billion in debt, assets frozen, fleet being liquidated, founders in hiding — is not a story about poor execution. By all accounts, Alerzo built real infrastructure, served real customers, and solved real problems for small retailers. The company raised $20 million from credible investors. It operated for over six years. It deployed hundreds of vehicles and employed hundreds of people.
But none of that matters if the unit economics don’t work. And in Nigerian B2B e-commerce, the unit economics never worked.
The ₦5 billion loan Alerzo took in January 2025 was not growth capital. It was survival capital. The company was already burning cash, already struggling to service debt, already facing a structural margin problem that no amount of operational efficiency could fix. The loan bought Alerzo 13 months. That’s it.
Now the company is selling its buses and motorcycles to pay back Moniepoint — ironically, one of Nigeria’s most successful fintechs, valued at over $1 billion, which made its fortune precisely by not trying to compete in low-margin distribution and instead focusing on high-margin payments and merchant lending.
For the Nigerian startup ecosystem, Alerzo’s failure is a wake-up call. The $20 million raised, the press coverage, the investor enthusiasm — none of it mattered because the underlying business model was unsustainable from day one. Venture capital can paper over bad unit economics for a while. But eventually, the math catches up.
And when it does, even the best-funded startups end up selling their assets to pay their debts.
