Grace Ashiru
MaxAB, an Egyptian B2B e-commerce marketplace that connects food and grocery stores to suppliers in Egypt and Morocco, has announced that it has raised $40 million in a pre-Series A funding round.
The funds will fuel its expansion across the MENAP region, finance growth in its e-commerce arm, expand its technology and product teams, and scale its fintech arm by offering a broader range of embedded finance solutions.
Silver Lake contributed to this funding round through its Long-Term Capital strategy, British International Investment, the UK government’s development finance institution, and DisruptAD, ADQ’s venture platform. Existing investors like Beco Capital, 4DX Ventures, Flourish Ventures, and Africa Platform Capital also participated in the round.
Since its launch in 2018, MaxAB’s e-commerce company has helped deliver 2.5 million orders and worked with about 150,000 traditional retailers.MaxAB began rolling out its fintech solutions to all its merchants in 2021. This was done to digitize cash flow and make MaxAB a one-stop shop for traditional retailers.
MaxAB has become the market leader in its field by having offices in all of Egypt’s major cities and Casablanca, Morocco. The company wants to keep growing. By the end of 2023, it wants to be in the whole country of Morocco and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.MaxAB estimates that over 750,000 small businesses require its services in Egypt and Morocco alone. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia is attractive due to the government’s drive to digitalize the informal sector and the FMCG’s willingness to explore new business models.
Belal El-Megharbel, CEO and co-founder of MaxAB, talked about the investment and the company’s plans to grow in North Africa. He said, “In just four years of operations, we re-engineered the informal food and grocery market in Morocco and Egypt.
We are delighted to have received the recognition, financial support of world-class investors, which adds to the positive response and support we have received from the retailers and suppliers we serve. We are excited about venturing into the next stage of the MaxAB journey, which involves further consolidation of the informal grocery sector, heavy focus and investments in fintech, and replicating our success in new markets so that we can grow beyond borders. We are excited about this next stage based on the quality of investors partnering with us.
Amer Al Ameri, Head of Venture Capital and Technology Investments at ADQ, said, “MaxAB is building technology-driven products and services that solve problems in the MENAP region by making grocery supply chains more integrated, efficient, and reliable.”By digitizing the vastly traditional, multi-layered, and fragmented food and grocery supply chain, they have broken the mould and created a domino effect of opportunities; the launch of the fintech vertical is one of them.
We’re excited to start this journey with MaxAB and can’t wait to give them strategic advice to help them keep growing and making an impact.
