Karachi-headquartered B2B E-commerce and fintech company Bazaar has received a $70 million Series B round lead. The round, which comes just six months after the business’s Series A funding of $30 million, was led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global. Bazaar’s series B financing of $70 million places it among the best-funded startups in the country.
Built just a few years ago, Bazaar is a system provider in Pakistan for traditional retail. Its currently offered products include a B2B e-commerce marketplace that helps retailers (mainly grocery stores) to enter inventory into their stores, Easy Khata, and a short-term financing product, Bazaar Credit.
The bazaar’s marketplace serves retailers in 21 cities of Pakistan through dozens of fulfillment centers. The company remodels 3-4 new towns every year and is on track to increase the country’s largest tech-enabled society network by the end of the year, it stated in an announcement.
The company is trying to make the last-mile footprint it’s fastest-growing by adding 3-4 new cities and towns every month and is on track to establish the country’s largest area served by innovative technology by the end of this year.
Khata, a software product by Bazaar, aids in the transformation of paper records into digital files, and it has recently signed up around 2.4 million users.
Bazaar Credit, the company’s recent offering with over a thousand digital loans to merchants thus far has returned fully. The software incorporates client data from the company’s online marketplace and its merchant software products to provide a customized offering.
Christian Jensen, Partner at Dragoneer Investment Group, commenting on the investment said “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. 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.”
Hamza Jawaid and Saad Jangda, the founders of Bazaar, said, “We are humbled and excited to continue on the path to create a generation-defining story for Pakistan. With 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.”
Bazaar, Pakistan’s leading online marketplace for retailers, plans to use the latest round of funding to expand into more cities across Pakistan, launch new marketplace categories, scale its lending offerings, and build out its logistics infrastructure.
