Bazaar Raises $70M in Pakistan’s Second-Largest Funding Round

Bazaar Technologies, a B2B eCommerce startup based in Pakistan, has raised $70 million in what was the country’s second-largest funding round on record, according to published reports Tuesday (March 15).

Founded in 2020 by friends Hamza Jawaid and Saad Jangda, Bazaar provides small merchants in Pakistan with services that include procurement, fulfillment, operating software, digital lending and supply chain products.

See also: B2B Digital Platform Bazaar Nets $30M In Series A Funding

The company operates in 21 cities throughout Pakistan, reaching more than 500 towns, and is on track to become the country’s biggest tech-backed last-mile delivery provider by year’s end. Bazaar said it has more than 2.4 million businesses on its Easy Khata and recorded more than $10 billion in transactions in yearly bookkeeping.

This funding comes just month after Bazaar raised $30 million in another milestone in Pakistani startups: the largest Series A in the country’s history.

The largest funding round so far came last year as well, when quick delivery startup Airlift raised $85 million.

Pakistan, the fifth most populous country in the world, saw an investment boom last year, as foreign investors gave record amounts of money to the nation’s startups: $233 million in the first nine months of 2021, exceeding the funding raised in the previous six years combined.

Read more: With A Larger Population Than Brazil, Pakistan’s Newly Digital SMBs Offer Huge Opportunity

But as PYMNTS has noted, many of the country’s small merchants have been overlooked as the shift to digital hasn’t afforded them with an easy way to accept cashless payments.

The country saw an eCommerce boom during the global pandemic, and retailers who weren’t using digital payments or selling online were forced to embrace online payments and eCommerce, said JazzCash then-CEO Erwan Gelebart.

“Even if consumers have the money and the willingness to pay for goods and services and the mobile wallets to use, merchants are the ones either accepting or declining” the method of payment based on what they can support,  he said in an August interview with PYMNTS.