EGYPT – Egyptian online grocery retail startup Tawfeer Market has raised US$500K in a seed round which recorded participation of Alexandria Business Angels Networks.
Launched towards the end of 2019, Tawfeer Market allows users to find and purchase groceries via app, which it then delivers via its fulfillment arm.
The quick commerce app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times so far, with tens of thousands of orders growing at a steady two-digit rate month-on-month.
The recent investment is aimed to help it grow, and to expand beyond its current operating base Alexandria, Egypt’s second most populous city.
According to the co-founder and CEO of Tawfeer Market, Ahmad Fasseeh, the grocery retail market is enormous, exceeding US$50 billion, but the market in Egypt still lags behind.
“The future of online grocery retail in Egypt is expected to grow exponentially, leaving room for many players to fulfill different needs,” he said.
Retail grocery consumers seek three main criteria: variety, convenience, and price. Tawfeer Market tries to offer the right formula that fulfills consumer needs in the majority of their orders, offering the most commonly ordered 4,000 SKUs, including fresh and frozen food, at the lowest price within 60 minutes.
According to reports by Magnitt, the Q-commerce proposition has been observing a staggering growth in popularity and VC interest over the past few years.
As the transport and logistics sector in MENA observes more than 150% YoY growth in funding over 2021 and funding in the E-commerce space increases by more than 200%, ventures are starting to play in both markets simultaneously.
Over 2021, sizable funds have been raised by on-demand delivery startups and Q-commerce propositions across MENA, even in seed and pre-seed stages.
Q-commerce startups design a mix of well-placed dark stores or fulfilment centres and integrate fleet management technologies to dispatch products in short delivery windows as low as 20 minutes like in the case of RabbitMart, an Egyptian inventory-led on-demand delivery venture.
Rabbit recently raised US$11 million in pre-seed funding, a new record for its stage in Africa and the Middle East.
The start-up controls the end-to-end experience on its platform with a live inventory tracking system in its warehouses to monitor what’s on the shelf and equip riders with the necessary protective gear and technology to make the deliveries.
Still in North Africa, Sle3ti, a Casablanca-based B2B marketplace that allows retailers to order directly from suppliers and distributors of consumer goods (FMCG), clinched 12 million MDH (US$3.2m) from the investment fund of the Richbond Group.
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