Brimore, an Egyptian social commerce startup, has secured a $25 million Series A round co-led by International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Endure Capital.
Other investors include fintech giant Fawry, Flourish, Endeavor Catalyst Fund. Existing investors who participated in its $800,000 seed round and $3.5 million Series A, such as Algebra Ventures (led both rounds), Disruptech and Vision Ventures, participated.
Founded in 2017 by Mohamed Abdulaziz and Ahmed Sheikha, Brimore is a social commerce platform, that enables the local manufacturers to overcome the Go-to-Market challenges and grow on a national scale through a powerful commercial arm of ’Individuals’. This network sells and recommends the products in their surrounding circles either to other individuals or to their small trade shops in their streets via all possible channels (OmniChannel).
For Brimore, the next phase for Brimore would be to grow in Egypt by 50x within the next couple of years. Other use of funds entails expanding its logistics and operational infrastructure, doubling its staff size, triple product catalogues and quadrupling its sellers and suppliers network.
Over the past three years, Brimore claims to have grown around 400x in revenue. More than 300 suppliers with approximately 8,000 different SKUs from packaged foods, personal care, and household goods are on the platform. The social commerce platform has also built a network of 75,000 sellers (74% of them are women) covering 27 cities, primarily rural and remote areas, in Egypt.
When sellers register on the platform, they see various product images from different manufacturers. They share these pictures on their socials: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, generate orders and place them on the app. Once Brimore confirms, its delivery process depends on where the sellers want their products delivered: to them or their end consumers.
CEO Mohamed Abdulaziz said: “We started working on Brimore with the mindset of actually manufacturing products ourselves. However, producing our products wasn’t the wisest decision at that time as it was a very asset-heavy model.
“So we started scaling with listing different products. And at the same time, it was very insightful to see how the network formed on the other side. From a seller perspective, we started onboarding more and more sellers. Most of them happen to be women.”
Abdulaziz adds: “We want to crack the concept of go to market in Africa. We know that Africa is like 54 different markets with distinct dynamics of every market.
“Our vision is if we crack the concept of go-to-market through people and reaching the online and offline and the component of trust all together, towards the new age of commerce, the cross border trade will be our next thing. Anyone can produce anything can sell anywhere because we enable the hard part about market access.”
