Zbooni, MENA’s leading digital enabler for SMEs, has announced it has raised $5million in ‘Series A’ funding. The investment, led by a London-based fund, will be used to expand the Zbooni team across its current core markets of UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
The company has already brought in key hires across its product development, data analytics, marketing and customer success divisions, as it continues to support a growing number of businesses across the region.
Speaking about the landmark investment, Zbooni CEO and co-founder Ramy Assaf, said “Zbooni is on a mission to help provide access to digital commerce tools, ultimately supporting our merchants to start, run and grow their business. While we wish to keep the investor undisclosed, their reputation and track record speaks for itself, they have previously invested in some of the most successful emerging market growth stories – operating a fund of well over $1billion in assets under management. Through this support, Zbooni will invest in people to develop even better products for our merchants and enhance the customer experience with best-in-class technology.”
Since its inception in 2017, Zbooni has demonstrated perpetual growth, as it supports an increasingly buoyant MENA ecosystem for entrepreneurs. The company provides services for a wide variety of businesses, with tools including invoicing technology, payment enablement, digital store creation and customer management support. At the turn of the year, Zbooni announced it had recorded rapid acceleration in 2020, including 600% in customer growth. As of January 2021, Zbooni supports thousands of merchants, transacting tens of millions of dirhams every month and to-date has allowed its merchants to serve more than 150,000 end-customers.
The platform, which started out as a chat commerce venture enabling payments via WhatsApp, has spent the past 12 months diversifying its product line to provide a full suite of business support and enablement tools. This strategic development has increased the core number of merchants using Zbooni, while also increasing retention of merchants across all geographic markets.
“Our customers are the real heroes of this story, and we’re just scratching the surface of what we’re able to help them do,” said Assaf. “We believe there remain millions of SMEs still left severely underserved across our geographies – we are here for them.”
