Early Snap Backer Leads Fundraising for Middle East E-Retailer - Bloomberg
The e-commerce platform Retailo has raised $36 million to help fund its effort to digitize mom-and-pop stores in Pakistan, U.A.E. and its home country of Saudi Arabia.
The Riyadh-based company’s Series A round was led by Silicon Valley’s Graphene Ventures, an early-stage investor in Snap Inc. and Lyft Inc. The funding round is among the ten largest over the past year in the three countries Retailo operates in, according to data by Crunchbase. It raised $29 million in equity and $7 million in debt.
A string of startups has sprung up in recent years targeting the region’s retail shops, which often run with manual cash registers and handwritten entries. It’s a $500 billion industry made up of more than 10 million small businesses in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan, according to Retailo. Tiger Global Management LLC made its first investment in Pakistan two months ago in CreditBook, a firm that offers digital book-keeping solutions to small businesses.
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