LAHORE – A business-to-business ecommerce platform, Zarya, has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding led by Raed Ventures.
The Lahore-based startup, which has been established by brothers Faisal and Saad Zahid, announced the development on Monday.
The pre-seed round was led by Raed Ventures and participants included Fatima Gobi Ventures, US-based Class 5 Global, Global Founders Capital, and Egyptian social commerce startup Taager, it said in a press release.
The startup aims to “eliminate the friction small-scale sellers face in sourcing products, arranging delivery and collecting payment”. This would free up the sellers’ time to focus on sales, it added.
Many of Zarya’s customers are housewives looking to make additional income, it said in the press release.
The app offers over 3,000 items and most of which related to women and children clothing. The company is now planning to expand the categories such as abayas, shoes, socks, home textiles and makeup.
The funds from Raed Ventures and others will enable Zarya to widen its supply offering while maintaining reliability. “Being successful at scale will require robust supply chain and process automation to ensure the service is reliable and remains customer-centric,” the press release further said.
“Pakistan has over 100 million YouTube and 45m Facebook users. They are spending more than three hours per day on social media apps. If [they are] spending so much time online, it’s quite natural to start buying and selling while on social media apps. We aim to give our sellers every opportunity to thrive in this environment,” Faisal said, while commenting on the pre-seed funding.
Read more: https://pakobserver.net/pakistani-startups-raise-record-305-million-in-9-months-of-2021/
