While stuck in traffic in Lagos a few years ago, I noticed a couple of delivery motorcycles buzzing in between the stopped cars. Emblazoned across the sides of the motorbikes was the logo of Jumia, a company that brands itself as the “largest e-commerce platform in Africa.” I’d heard about the bikes, but this was the first time I’d seen them in action: a bespoke solution to the problem of commercial delivery in Nigeria. All around, Lagos’s street-level trading culture was bustling despite the ninety-degree heat. Beneath umbrella-covered stands, dozens of curbside merchants sold products as varied as mobile phones and kola nuts. Venders walked in the congested lanes with goods stacked on their heads, hawking batteries, DVDs, road maps, drinks, and snacks to drivers. The motorbikes throttled around them, at times coming alarmingly close to the peddlers, threatening a literal collision between present and future Nigerian commerce.

A few years on, Jumia has become Africa’s best-funded e-commerce startup. In February, its parent company, Jumia Group, which was then called Africa Internet Group, became the continent’s first unicorn, surpassing a billion dollars in market value thanks to a funding round from the insurance company A.X.A. (A later round involving Goldman Sachs, among others, confirmed the valuation.) Jumia Group is often referred to as the “Amazon.com of Africa,” but it’s more like a Silicon Valley unto its own, with eleven digital ventures spread out across twenty-three countries. The largest and most important of Jumia Group’s ventures is the shopping site Jumia.com, which operates in eleven countries; the parent company also owns African versions of Hotels.com (Jovago), Uber (EasyTaxi), Gilt (Zando), and Zillow (Lamudi), among others.

The billion-dollar question, for investors, is whether the opportunity afforded by Africa’s large and growing population outweighs the structural challenges the continent presents. Fewer than a quarter of African roads are paved, according to the International Road Federation, and many of Jumia Group’s core markets, including Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt, struggle with access to electricity and frequent outages. Moreover, fewer than a third of Africans have the Internet service they need to order goods and services online.

Nowhere is the belief that these limitations can be overcome greater than in Nigeria, the continent’s largest economy and most populous nation, with more than a hundred and eighty million people. Jumia Group’s head office lies in the Yaba district of Lagos, which in recent years has drawn an increasing number of tech incubators and startups. The presence of these companies has helped to reverse a long-standing pattern of brain drain, drawing in talented Nigerians who might once have gone abroad, enticing others to return, and luring ambitious Western professionals, too. Jumia Group, which was founded in 2012 by the Berlin-based company Rocket Internet, has more than three thousand employees; its C.E.O., Sacha Poignonnec, a former McKinsey consultant, is French, while Jumia’s chief executive in Nigeria, Juliet Anammah, is Nigerian. Although Western news coverage has focussed largely on the country’s pervasive corruption and instability in its northeast, the government has been investing billions of dollars in its power-generation and transportation systems, and pursuing public-private partnerships to improve its technology infrastructure. Nigeria also passed a promising political milestone last year when, for the first time in its history, a sitting President, Goodluck Jonathan, conceded electoral defeat to an opposition candidate, Muhammadu Buhari.

Jumia Group executives hope that Nigeria will serve as a base for the expansion of African e-commerce. In 2015, the last full year for which figures are available, Jumia brought in a hundred and forty-nine million dollars in revenue, a decent number, but relatively small compared with the four hundred billion dollars that McKinsey’s Global Institute estimates that Nigeria’s consumers spent the previous year. McKinsey predicts that by 2025 Africans could be buying seventy-five billion dollars worth of goods and services online annually, which suggests promise for Jumia’s other markets (currently, Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda). “The opportunity is driven by a large structural gap between supply and demand,” Poignonnec told me. “You see this on the ground in Nigeria, where there are millions of people with growing discretionary income, but few formal retail stores per capita. You also see it at global airports, where Africans are lined up with heavy luggage, full of products they cannot easily find back home.”

The possibility of widespread adoption of e-commerce taps into the trend of “leapfrogging”—developing local innovation in order to overcome structural deficiencies. In Kenya, for example, mobile-money services like M-Pesa have emerged in response to the absence of consumer banks, giving millions of Africans access to digital finance. Although many African countries have strong commercial-trading cultures, these often operate informally, at open markets and roadside stalls rather than retail chains, indoor malls, or big-box stores. “In the U.S., e-commerce is slowly changing centuries of old shopping habits. Here it is creating the habits,” Poignonnec said. “People are making their first big buys, like smartphones, and first online purchases simultaneously.”

To encourage these habits, Jumia Group will spend some of its latest funding round on “customer adoption centers”—boutique-style booths with laptops and tablets, where prospective shoppers can navigate its companies’ Web sites, guided by company representatives. JForce, a similar program, already in place, has salespeople going door to door with Wi-Fi-connected tablets. The top JForce performers can become regional and neighborhood “captains,” which lets their clients place orders and receive customer service and delivery directly from them. “It allows agents to become entrepreneurs,” Poignonnec said, “effectively operating their own online retail business right from home.”

Poignonnec told me that nearly every step of the sales process entails some form of tailored solution. Once the orders are sent out, first-time shoppers might get a call from a specialist who confirms order, payment, and delivery details with new customers. Because many neighborhoods in African cities don’t have numbered address grids, drivers might ask customers to direct them to their residences by mobile phone. Most Jumia customers also pay cash on delivery, which means drivers are responsible for handling and keeping safe much of the company’s cash. Jumia also accommodates orders from unstable areas, including Boko Haram-controlled parts of the northeast, building a premium into the prices and requiring payment in advance, then striking deals with outside delivery services. Despite the challenges, the company managed, last year, to ship ten thousand packages a day throughout Nigeria. Poignonnec said that Jumia is now the largest third-party logistics company in Nigeria. “Bigger than any of the local players, like D.H.L., that we know of,” he said.

While these are significant achievements for Jumia, two venture capitalists I spoke with thought that it would be a challenge for Jumia Group to continue to grow in Nigeria, and to replicate its successes there in other countries. Eghosa Omoigui, a managing partner of EchoV.C., one of Silicon Valley’s few Africa-focussed investment funds, said that the company will need to continue attracting “large infusions of cash” if it wants to become consistently profitable. And Neal Hansch, a board member and former managing director of mestIncubator, in Accra, Ghana, pointed out that some of the company’s custom solutions are expensive—processing cash payments, for example, entails more overhead than digital methods—which will make expansion difficult. Indeed, Jumia.com lost a hundred and twenty-four million dollars in 2015. But Hansch pointed out, too, that Jumia Group now has “deeper pockets than ninety-nine per cent of African startups,” and that it “will face less competition with significantly more resources for its market than many Silicon Valley ventures.”

The question of competition promises to be increasingly important, because as African e-commerce grows, the market becomes more attractive to companies based both inside and outside the continent. Uber, a potential competitor to EasyTaxi, is operating in seven countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. Facebook opened its first permanent Africa office in 2015 to broaden its advertising reach, which could challenge Jumia Group’s classified-advertising platform, Vendito. It’s also widely believed that Amazon and its Chinese counterpart, Alibaba, are planning to enter Africa in earnest, which could pose a concern—or an opportunity—for Jumia.

Amazon wouldn’t comment on its expansion plans on the continent, but it is already shipping a limited number of products to Nigeria and Kenya, among other countries. If and when it arrives in force, it could try to build its own infrastructure, or it could buy an existing network, as it did in China, where it acquired Joyo.com, then rebranded it. The former would mean new and significant competition for Jumia; the latter could mean a lucrative sale. When I asked Poignonnec about the possibility of a buyout, he said that such a decision, if it came, would be a long way off, and would depend on what the company’s investors wanted to do. But, he said, “we have nothing against any option, as long as it creates value for Africa.”