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Friday, March 29, 2024

Pakistani startup Bazaar’s $70M fundraising led by Dragoneer, Tiger Global

A Pakistani startup is being supported by Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global. Bazaar’s $70 million Series B fundraising is being led by the two investors.

Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global have announced their support for Bazaar, a company seeking to digitise Pakistan’s retail with e-commerce, finance, and last-mile supply chain solutions.

With this, Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global have joined  a growing number of high-profile investors placing substantial bets in the South Asian industry.

Saad Jangda and Hamza Jawaid, childhood friends, reconnected in Dubai a few years ago.

The potential they saw in their native country inspired them to return to Pakistan and build Bazaar.

The startup’s $70 million Series B fundraising is being led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global.

Existing investors such as Indus Valley Capital, Defy Partners, Acrew Capital, Wavemaker Partners, B&Y Venture Partners, and Zayn Capital joined the current round, bringing the startup’s total funding to more than $100 million.

In Pakistan, Bazaar is seeking to establish a “operating system for conventional retail.”

It’s a $170 billion market with 5 million small and medium-sized firms and enterprises in the United States.  However, these merchants are mostly unbanked and unconnected today.

Because these merchants lack a credit score, banks and other traditional financial institutions will not issue loans to them.

Because of this void, many of these shop owners have been driven to seek loans from shark loan providers.

In India, Udaan, logistics firm ElasticRun, and Dukaan, a business that helps retailers go online, as well as scores of startups and behemoths like Reliance and Amazon, are tackling a similar problem. Many of these offerings are being combined by Bazaar.

Thanks to its network of a dozen fulfilment facilities, the startup’s B2B e-commerce marketplace is assisting merchants in 21 towns and cities across Pakistan in acquiring things to sell.

Bazaar Credit, Bazaar’s banking arm, is providing short-term working capital lending to these merchants, many of whom operate neighborhood stores. Bazaar’s commerce, financial, and supply chain solutions.

He explained, “Bazaar recruits clients through Easy Khata, funnel them through commerce, and once we have enough data on the merchants, we start creating a credit product on top of it.”

He added that the business had made thousands of loans in recent months.

Easy Khata has over 2.4 million registered companies in 500 locations across Pakistan.

He said, “But, more crucially, Easy Khata is serving as both a core record system and assisting us in expanding into additional cities.”

According to the startup, merchants have registered over $10 billion in annualised bookkeeping transaction value on Easy Khata.

Jangda remarked, “Our expansion within Pakistan in the previous several months demonstrates how important Easy Khata is to us.”

The startup’s last-mile network, which was only active in two cities in August of last year, is now growing by three to four cities per month for Pakistani.

Jangda  said, “The goal is to continue to build for Pakistani. We intend to cover more than 100 urban and rural centres around the country and construct the country’s largest network so that we can carry any category of commodities from point A to point B whenever and wherever it is needed.  The business intends to use the new funds to expand into more locations across Pakistan and to develop new marketplace categories It is also expanding its loan operations and exploring new product lines.

A partner at Dragoneer Investment Group, Christian Jensen, said,”We are pleased to support Bazaar’s goal of developing an end-to-end commerce and finance platform for millions of unbanked and offline merchants in Pakistan.”

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