Egyptian B2B Ecommerce Platform MaxAB Closes $40M Investment
The company, which serves small grocers across Egypt, has secured its status as one of the best-funded startups in the country.
Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform MaxAB, whose headquarters rest in Cairo, has raised a stunning $40 million in a Series A investment round led by North African impact investor, RMBV.
The round also saw participation from a flurry of investors, namely IFC, Flourish Ventures, Crystal Stream Capital, Rise Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst, as well as the startup’s existing investors Beco Capital and 4DX Ventures.
The new funds raise MaxAB’s total funds to over $46 million, after it closed a $6.2 million seed round in September 2019, and secures the startup’s status as one of the best-funded in Egypt.
MaxAB, which was founded in 2018 by Belal El-Megharbel and Mohamed Ben Halim, exhibited its disruptive nature by becoming the first platform to serve small and traditional food and grocery retailers across the country, and has since sparked competition within the industry.
Since launching, MaxAB has served over 55,000 retailers in Egypt, fulfilling over 1 million orders and creating 1,600 jobs directly. It offers transparent pricing and provides 24-hour delivery, which has helped the company launch in a new city each month of 2021.
“It’s not just the technology platform,” says CEO El-Megharbel, “we operate our own warehouses, we operate our own fleet.”
Small retailers are the backbone of Egypt’s groceries market, with 400,000 traditional stores selling 90% of the country’s grocers.
“We saw that there is a massive role in optimizing this supply chain using technology so that we can have the right amount of products at the right place at the right time,” explained El-Megharbel.
With the new funds, MaxAB plans to expand across every key city in Egypt by the end of the year, before stepping into new markets within the MENA region. The investments will also be used for scaling the new supply chain and to continue pioneering the trend towards embedded finance solutions, which, in other words, is about enabling companies that cover non-financial services to be able to provide banking services.
