Homzmart, an Egyptian furniture marketplace has raised $1.3 million in a seed round from China’s MSA Capital, Oman Technology Fund (OTF), and Choueiri Group’s investment arm Equitrust. 500 Startups and some other strategic investors also joined the round.
Homzmart plans to use the investment to scale its tech, enhance customer experience, grow its selection and expand the team.
Homzmart which was founded in 2019 by Mahmoud Ibrahim and Ibrahim Mohamed, is a marketplace that connects furniture manufacturers and vendors with customers, selling furniture online.
The platform showcases different designs to help customers personalize their ideas and vision for their home, and bring it to reality, a feature the founders see as an important part of the furniture purchasing decision.
Mahmoud, the co-founder and CEO of Homzmart told Menabytes that they started Homzmart to solve pain points of both customers and furniture manufacturers.
“We are going after a huge market valued at more than $60 Billion. There are 25 million people in the MENA region searching for home furnishing every month with no serious player serving them online”, He said.
For customers, Homzmart is making both discovery and purchasing furniture easier.
The marketplace helps customers choose from thousands of SKUs from hundreds of sellers on its platform, “It is something that is not possible to do if you’re buying offline as the process of shopping furniture offline is extremely time consuming, lacks variety and there’s no way for customers to compare prices. Homzmart addresses all these pain points.”
When it comes to sellers and manufacturers, Mahmoud explained that a very large number of them, don’t have their showrooms as it is very expensive to open one, “When a customer is looking to make the purchase, they either go to established brands or ask their friends for a referral which means a lot of good sellers never get discovered by the customers.
“What we are doing is giving these manufacturers and sellers access to technology and helping them land more sales by reaching out to new customers.”
The platform currently has over 10,000 SKUs and has already served over 2,500 customers since its launch a few months ago.
Mahmoud said that Homzmart takes seven days on average from the date of order to get the furniture to a customer’s doorstep, “If a customer makes the purchase offline, receiving the furniture at their home sometimes could take up to four weeks.
