Karachi fintech SnappRetail raises $2.5M in pre-seed funding – Business
SnappRetail, a Karachi-based fintech startup, on Wednesday said it raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Zayn Capital’s Bitrate Fund.
Other investors included Antler and Century Oak Capital, according to the company.
SnappRetail was co-founded in 2021 by Unilever alumni Adeel Rasheed, Moazzam Ali Khan, Ahsan Aziz and Moiz Ali. This is the founding team’s second startup, having previously set up a retail recruitment consultancy, Resource Linked, which placed staff at over 100,000 retailers, the company said in a statement.
SnappRetail offers retailers point-of-sale (POS) tools and a digital operations platform—a micro-enterprise system for store operations—that helps brick-and-mortar retailers increase their margins and revenue.
“Through deployment of SnappRetail POS hardware and a sales-driven data optimization operating system, they will gain access to microcredit for working capital, ability to accept digital and card payments, unlock cost efficiencies and increase sales,” the statement said. .
“It’s hard to believe that retail, which is such a significant contributor to Pakistan’s GDP, is still run on pen and paper,” said fintech CEO and co-founder Rasheed, adding that “little or no data exists for these businesses to create meaningful decisions and, critically, seeking funding to help them succeed. They’re missing out on revenue and we’re moving retailers from manual to digital ways of working in all their day-to-day operations for the store.”
Rasheed claims SnappRetail will help retailers increase revenue by 25 to 50 percent.
Co-founder Moazzam Ali Khan said the entire retail and startup ecosystem was working to improve the livelihood of the traditional retailer. “We’re trying to create an ecosystem where all aggregators and other applications can come in and take advantage of our base platform.”
Zayn BitRate Fund co-founder Faisal Aftab said that SnappRetail had the right approach to solve the essential problem of the retailer.
“We were particularly impressed with the experience and maturity this founding team brings to the table, striking the right balance between hyper-growth and managing the burn,” he added.
“This balance is the need of the hour as SnappRetail prepares for national and eventually international success.”
General partner and founder of Antler, Jussi, also echoed similar views.
“We have been thoroughly impressed by the vision SnappRetail brings to the technology industry in Pakistan and look forward to seeing them build on their great progress.”
