Taager, the leading social e-commerce platform for the MENA region, today announced the completion of its $6.75 million pre-Series B funding round, led by Africa-focused tech growth fund Norrsken22.This round will enable the company to fuel its growth in the Middle East.
The oversubscribed round included participation from Endeavor Catalyst and Beltone VC, in addition to all existing investors, including 4DX Ventures, RAED Ventures, BECO Capital and Breyer Capital.
Over the past two decades, social e-commerce, which is the process of directly buying and selling products through social media platforms, has evolved from a mere concept to a prominent shopping method poised to overtake traditional retail. It effectively blends consumers’ everyday lives (social media interaction) with online shopping through a single path to purchase, fundamentally changing the entire customer journey.
Global social e-commerce revenue is predicted to reach $2.5 trillion by 2025. In the MENA region alone, it already surpassed $14 billion, accounting for over 30% of all e-commerce sales today. Social e-commerce has succeeded where traditional e-commerce has failed in these regions due to the importance of trusted relationships with social sellers, the cultural relevance of product selection and marketing, and the already existing widespread adoption and usage of social media as a distribution medium.
The MENA region is home to a large and fast-growing base of digitally native youth who want to and are already participating in this market. However, starting and scaling a social e-commerce business is difficult and these social sellers struggle with complex supply chains, a lack of capital, the inability to reach a geographically diverse consumer base and no data or insights to run a profitable business. Taager solves this by providing an end-to-end platform for social sellers by providing access to a trending product catalogue, data and insights into pricing and marketing optimisation, end-to-end logistics, embedded financing for purchasing inventory, multi-market payment collection and tools to optimise their business and profitability. Ultimately, Taager aims to become the core demand generation and data platform for social e-commerce activity across the MENA region.
Taager’s technology teams are best positioned to use the unique/proprietary data points gathered across the years of the social e-commerce ecosystem over thousands of merchants and products serving millions of their end customers. Through machine learning applications, they are able to serve their merchants through intelligent product bundling/matching and predict and segment the end customer persona and their delivery rate, driving more profits to the merchants.
Taager is also utilising the recent advancements of generative AI and extending its scalable operations platform with the use of AI sales agents, able to serve more merchants and end customers with the same and fewer CAPEX requirements.
Mohamed Elhorishy, Taager’s co-founder and CEO, says, “Our mission is to enable absolutely anyone to start and scale a profitable social e-commerce business. We empower women, young people, and low-income earners—and in a way that is sustainable for both us and them. Taager has, on average, increased the profitability of their merchants by 2.5x. We’re extremely proud that Taager has transformed the lives of our social sellers. This platform has helped thousands of people to achieve a stable income, secure financial independence and pay off debts.”
Today, up until today, Taager has served over 45,000 online social sellers. This funding will support the company’s growth within MENA by allowing them to further build out their data insights and tools for social sellers, expand their product selection and scale their skilled team.
“Taager has created its own category, which means we have had to spend the past five years building social commerce fundamentals from the ground up. In the past two years, we have refined the business, becoming more capital efficient and scalable and improved our core unit economics. Now it’s time to scale. We have laid the groundwork to enable us to grow five times within the next few years,” Elhorishy added.
Nivesh Pather, Principal at Norrsken22, says, “Taager is redefining e-commerce in the MENA region by empowering thousands of entrepreneurs with the tools, insights, and infrastructure to build and scale their businesses. This team has been exceptional in being able to successfully navigate scaling into multiple markets profitably, including Saudi Arabia. We are excited to be partnering with Mohamed and his team on Taager’s next phase of growth.”