Lahore-based B2B e-commerce startup, Tajir, announced that it has raised $17 million in a Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins.
Mamoon Hamid, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, who led the round, said that given Pakistan’s prevalent bodega model, what Tajir was doing was very compelling. He said, “Their software and mission to improve that supply chain and availability of products and pricing and digitizing that process made a ton of sense.”
“I thought that would be the first foray for a company to make an attempt at doing a lot more to be a consumer company, not just a wholesale company,” Hamid added.
Other investors in the round include YC Continuity, AAVCF, Fatima Gobi Ventures, Flexport, Golden Gate Ventures, Liberty City Ventures, VentureSouq, and angel investors, including Under 30 honoree and CEO of Figma, Dylan Field, and Flexport CEO, Ryan Petersen, Forbes reported.
A statement published by Kleiner Perkins said, “We’re proud to make Kleiner Perkins’ first investment in Pakistan, and partner with Babar, Ismail, and the entire Tajir team as they transform how stores in Pakistan source inventory and grow.”
Tajir’s customers are small independent businesses, or as they are more commonly known ‘mom and pop stores.’ Such small businesses often struggle to purchase inventory, where Tajir comes in.
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Tajir was co-founded by two brothers, Babar Khan and Ismail Khan. Babar, who serves as the CEO of the company, said, “When consumers walk into small mom and pop stores they often find the products they want out of stock.”
He added, “Stores are often unable to provide the brands that consumers actually want to buy since retail is so fragmented in Pakistan.”
He further elaborated the problems such small businesses face, including shop owners often having to spend hours to procure supplies, and sometimes even having to close their stores, or find a friend or relative to go to the wholesaler physically — a pattern that would repeat too often and would take too much time.
Tajir has digitized the process, and its customers can place orders through a mobile application, where they can also compare prices of different vendors and purchase inventory with a one-day delivery guarantee. “We’re doing for stores in Pakistan what Amazon did for consumers in the US,” Babar said.
Ismail Khan, who is serving as the CTO of the company, said that 90 percent of the retail economy in Pakistan flows through these mom-and-pop stores, which highlights the importance of these stores and the need to resolve time and supply issues faced by this segment. “These are small, difficult to access. It’s a problem for brands to deliver in a reliable way,” Ismail said.
Tajir is now a one-stop shop for sellers to compare the prices of goods, purchase inventory, and enjoy the convenience of 24/7 ordering with next-day delivery. They’re already servicing thousands of neighborhood stores in Lahore and have been growing in large part from word of mouth from the goodwill they’ve built with the seller community.
The bulk of products that Tajir sells include convenience store items, packaged consumer products, like biscuits, soft drinks, home, and personal care items, soaps, shampoos, etc. The revenue model of Tajir is based on taking a percentage of the orders.
This is not the first time that Tajir has landed notable seed funding. Last year, in summer, Tajir raised $1.8 million, and since then, its revenue has increased by ten times.
