Dragoneer And Tiger Global Lead Bazaar’s $70 Million Series B Funding Round

In a Series B financing round led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global, Pakistan’s Bazaar has raised $70 million. The round saw the participation of other investors placing their bets in the South Asian markets and they include – Valley Capital, Defy Partners, Acrew Capital, Wavemaker Partners, B&Y Venture Partners, and Zayn Capital.

Bazaar is a startup digitalizing Pakistan’s retail sector with e-commerce, fintech and last-mile supply chain solutions. Following the latest funding round, the eighteen months old startups has raised a total of over $100 million. What the startup is trying to do basically is to build an “operating system for traditional retail” in the country. The opportunities abound in the country as well as the South Asian market is quite endless and Bazaar wants to leverage them. Pakistan for instance is a $170 billion market that has 5 million small and medium-sized enterprises. There are a lot of opportunities for startups like Bazaar…

Albeit it has gotten better compared to a few years ago, many retailers still remain unbanked and are yet to be digitalized. Moreso, they are excluded from access to credit facilities from formal financial institutions like banks because they may not have a credit score. This makes them susceptible to loans from loan sharks which leaves them in a debt cycle.

Bazaar is looking to solve the aforementioned challenges with its offerings. It B2B marketplace, for instance, is helping retailers in over twenty towns and cities in the country to procure items to sell. Other offerings include its Easy Khata app which helps these merchants with bookkeeping activities, its financial arm called Bazaar Credit which provides merchants with financing, etc.

According to co-founder Saad Jangda, “We had just started piloting our credit product and at the time we had partnered with a third-party. Now, our credit product is developed completely in-house and is digitally-enabled that connects to our last-mile network. Everything from order generation to credit disbursement to cash collection is done completely by Bazaar,” adding that “We acquire customers through Easy Khata, funnel them through commerce, and once we have enough data on the merchants, we start building a credit product atop of it.”

He emphasized that Eazy Khata had amassed more than 2.4 million registered businesses across 500 cities in Pakistan and that its financing arm had extended thousands of loans in recent months. “But more importantly, Easy Khata is serving as both a core system of records and also helping us launch in new cities,” he added.

“Our expansion within Pakistan in the last few months is a testament to how crucial Easy Khata is for us,” the co-founder said emphasizing that merchants have recorded more than $10 million in yearly bookkeeping transaction value on Easy Khata.

He did reveal that Bazaar’s last-mile network which operated in only two cities as of August last year is adding at least three cities every month. “The goal is to keep building for Pakistan. We want to cover more than 100 urban and rural centres across the country and build the largest network in the country so that we can move any category of goods from point A to B whenever and wherever is needed.”

In a statement commenting on the financing round, Christian Jensen of Dragoneer Investment Group said that  “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.”

The funds from the funding round will be used to fuel Bazaar’s expansion plans across Pakistan as well as to scale its products.