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SnappRetail secures $2.5m to digitise retailers in Pakistan

SnappRetail secures $2.5m to digitise retailers in Pakistan

Pakistani retail startup SnappRetail has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding for its microenterprise system for retailers to help them compete with modern hypermarkets like Alfatah and Imtiaz.

The pre-seed funding round was led by Zayn Capital’s BitRate Fund with participation by Antler and Century Oak Capital. Based on Crunchbase data, this is one of largest pre-seed rounds raised in the sector in the country.

SnappRetail offers retailers point of sale (POS) tools and a digital operating platform – a micro enterprise system for end-to-end shop operations – that helps traditional retailers to grow their margin and revenue while helping micro-retailers upgrade who are losing out to growing modern supermarkets because of inefficient operations, inadequate cash flows, and cluttered in-store display.

Through the deployment of SnappRetail POS hardware and a sales driven data optimization operating system, they will get access to micro credit for working capital, ability to accept digital and card payments, unlock cost efficiencies and grow their sales.

SnappRetail was co-founded in 2021 by Adeel Rasheed (ex-Unilever), Moazzam Ali Khan (ex Unilever/L’oreal), Ahsan Aziz (ex TRG) and Moiz Ali (Ex Primatics Financials). SnappRetail is their second startup venture having previously founded retail recruitment consultancy Resource Linked which placed employees at over 100,000 retailers.

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They have seen up close and first-hand the spread of the retail industry across Pakistan. Retail is the second biggest contributor to Pakistan’s GDP at $170 billion and an industry comprising 3 million businesses.

CEO and co-founder of SnappRetail Adeel Rasheed 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. Little to no data exists for these businesses to make meaningful decisions and, critically, to seek finance to help them succeed. They are missing out on revenue and we are moving retailers from manual ways of working to digital ways of working in all their daily tasks for the shop. We anticipate this change in approach will help them increase revenue by 25-50 per cent.”

image 1 - SnappRetail secures $2.5m to digitise retailers in Pakistan
SnappRetail founding team: (L to R) Ahsan Aziz, Moiz Ali, Adeel Rasheed, Moazzam Ali Khan and Tariq Bashir.

Co-founder SnappRetail Moazzam Ali Khan said, “Our ambition is to support retailers and we will collaborate with the industry because the true winner will be the customer in terms of product choice, service and price.”

“We believe that the whole retail and startup ecosystem is working towards improving the livelihoods of the traditional retailer, grocery and beyond. We are trying to create an ecosystem where all aggregators and other applications can come in and take advantage of our base platform. With our pilot we have seen that retention is very high and gross transaction value through the system is extremely high vs any other play,” he added.

General Partner & Co-Founder at Zayn BitRate Fund Faisal Aftab said, “Being a proven concept globally, there is no doubt SnappRetail has the right approach to solving the essential problem of the retailer.”

“We were particularly impressed by the experience and maturity this founding team brings to the table, hitting the right balance between hypergrowth and managing the burn. This balance is the need of the hour as SnappRetail gears up for national and eventually international success,”

Jussi, General Partner and Founder at Antler, commented: “Having invested in similar plays globally, we have witnessed the immense market potential of this sector. We have been thoroughly impressed by the vision SnappRetail brings to the tech industry of Pakistan and are looking forward to seeing them build up on their great progress.”

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