Saudi Arabia’s Online Grocery Startup Nana Secures Over $6 Million In Series A Round

Saudi Arabian online grocery startup Nana raises a $6.6 million investment in a Series A round co-led by Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP) and Impact46, making their debut investment in partnership with other investors including Watar Partners, Saudi Venture Capital Company (SVC), Wamda Capital and the AlZamil family. The startup aims to use the new capital to accelerate its growth plans including the efforts to expand operations to involve more stores and supermarkets, continue to build and nurture its team and develop further vendor relations.

“Having built several enterprise products in the past, I want to tackle a core consumer challenge and was curious to build technologies to resolve it. Groceries form a significant fraction of a Saudi family’s monthly expenditure and I believed the experience they get in return could be enhanced manifold. All around the Middle East, more and more offline retail verticals from electronics to food are moving online, and this is what led me to Nana, a supermarket in your mobile phone,” says Sami AlHelwah, founder and CEO of Nana.

The startup operates an online grocery platform that serves 13 cities across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through a seamlessly efficient mobile-only technology suite that connects grocery customers, in-store pickers, supermarkets and delivery fleets.

“At MEVP, we like to back strong founders with exceptional technical capabilities, who are building truly differentiated products; and that is exactly what we saw in Nana. What the Nana team does very well, is offer a large selection of products, delivered seamlessly; and this is executed on the back of very robust tech,” notes Walid Mansour, partner and Chief Investment Officer (CIO) at MEVP.

Established in 2016, Nana takes pride in being an authentically home-grown startup that has envisioned and deployed a reconstructed grocery experience through technology built to act as means of integration with stores and supermarkets. The platform had managed to improve triple as much within the past year and is aiming for more promising developments including the on-boarding of new stores and supermarkets to increase visibility and accessibility.

“Our stores and supermarkets are the real champions. They shared the vision we had and have been so forthcoming throughout the integration cycle. It just goes to show that businesses, whether small or large, are welcoming technological innovation and that bodes well for all of us,” adds AlHelwah.