Bazaar, a B2B e-commerce and fintech platform, has raised $70M in Series B financing led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global Management. Existing investors, including Indus Valley Capital, Defy.vc, Acrew Capital, Wavemaker Partners, B&Y Venture Partners, and Zayn Capital also participated in the round.
This Series B comes just six months after raising a $30m Series A, taking the total capital funding to almost $108m. The startup provides procurement, fulfillment, operating software, digital lending, and supply chain products to merchants and suppliers in Pakistan.
“We are thrilled to support Bazaar’s vision of building an end-to-end commerce and fintech platform for millions of unbanked and offline merchants in Pakistan,” said Christian Jensen, Partner at Dragoneer Investment Group. “Bazaar’s pace of geographic expansion and new product development is a testament to the rare talent and culture Hamza and Saad have cultivated at Bazaar.”
Bazaar wants to build an operating system for traditional retail in Pakistan. “This retail economy, worth over $170B, is primarily offline and mostly served through 5 million SMEs across the country. This merchant base, which is the lifeline of Pakistan’s economy, also lacks access to formal financial services in a country that hosts the world’s third-largest unbanked population,” the company’s statement said. With the fresh round of funding, it plans to expand into more cities across Pakistan, launch new marketplace categories, scale its lending offerings, and accelerate new product development.
Bazaar’s B2B e-commerce marketplace is now servicing 21 towns and cities across Pakistan, covering 30% of the country’s population through more than a dozen functional fulfillment facilities. It claims to be adding 3-4 new cities and towns to its last-mile network every month.
Meanwhile, its ledger product, Easy Khata, allows merchants to digitize procurement, inventory management, customer engagement, accounting, and lending. The company claims to have on-boarded over 2.4 million businesses across 500 cities and towns in the country, recording over $10B in annualized bookkeeping transaction value.
Bazaar Credit, the recently launched short-term working capital financing product, provides much-needed liquidity to its largely unbanked merchant base. To date, Bazaar has provided thousands of digital loans, with 100% repayment and significant uplift in merchant buying volumes. Bazaar’s proprietary credit model incorporates customer data from both its marketplace and merchant software products, giving it a differentiated ability to lend to this underserved segment.
“We believe that Pakistan is at an inflection point in its tech ecosystem development. Bazaar is tapping into the massive merchant opportunity and is leading the charge in the country. We are excited to back their incredible team and phenomenal growth in such a short span of time.” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global Management.
The startup was founded in June 2020 by Hamza Jawaid and Saad Jangda, who have professional backgrounds in management consulting at McKinsey and product roles at Careem, and Snapchat respectively. “We are humbled and excited to continue on the path to create a generation-defining story for Pakistan. With the significant backing of two of the largest venture growth funds in the world, we believe this will continue to change the narrative on the country and inspire countless more and bigger stories in near future. This is a result of the trust and partnership of our colleagues, suppliers and most importantly our customers – the small merchants who are the backbone of our economy,” said the founders.
