Egypt-based e-commerce marketplace MaxAB raises US$ 40M

MaxAB, an Egypt-based B2B e-commerce marketplace that connects food and grocery retailers to suppliers, raised US$ 40 million in a Series A funding round on 5 July 2021.

Investors: The funding round was led by Impact investor RMBV, with participation from the IFC, Flourish Ventures, Crystal Stream Capital, Rise Capital, and Endeavour Catalyst and existing investors Beco Capital and 4DX Ventures. This round brings the company’s total investment to US$ 46.2 million to date.

Purpose of the funding: The funds raised will be utilized by the company to expand its footprint across the Middle East and North Africa. MaxAB also plans to hire more talent and scale its recently launched business verticals, including new supply chains and embedded finance solutions.

About MaxAB

Founded in November 2018 by Belal El-Megharbel and Mohamed Ben Halim, MaxAB is also called the Amazon for retail in the Middle East. It is a B2B e-commerce marketplace that connects food and grocery retailers to suppliers in Egypt’s most under-served geographies. It uses data-driven technologies and state of the art supply chains for this. Its mission is to empower Egyptian retailers by providing them with access to a wide range of products, premium service and operational support. MaxAB is headquartered in Cairo, Egypt.

The pandemic has led to more people ordering online. This growth has resulted in an increase in volume across e-commerce platforms all over the world. In terms of raising investments, startups in MENA have continued to garner interest, mainly in B2B e-commerce and MaxAB is one of them. It claims to have launched in a new city every month this year.

Store owners can use the MaxAB platform to purchase goods, request delivery or logistics to move the goods and access a customer support team. The company claims to serve more than 55,000 merchants and delivers over 2,000 unique products. 

What the CEO has to say: “It’s not just the technology platform, we operate our own warehouses, we operate our own fleet. And the idea was quite simple. Small merchants in Egypt, representing a large chunk of the nation’s GDP, find it hard to procure their inventory. On the other hand, manufacturers also have to suffer immensely and incur so many costs to serve a market like Egypt, where over 400,000 small mom-and-pop shops sell 90% of groceries in the country. We saw that there is a massive role in optimizing this supply chain using technology so that we can have the right number of products at the right place at the right time,” CEO El-Megharbel, who left Careem in 2018 to start MaxAB.

What the investors have to say: “The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the unique structure of Egypt’s economy, with hundreds of thousands of shopkeepers and small businesses becoming the lifeline of our country at the time of crisis. We are delighted to be backing visionary entrepreneurs that have created a transformative business with impressive growth that is a catalyst for financial inclusion and job creation. We look forward to supporting MaxAB in its next phase of development as they continue delivering on growth and innovation.” — Ahmed Badreldin, managing partner at RMBV.

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