Yassir, an African super app platform that provides on-demand services including ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, and payments, has raised $150 million in Series B investment, which is five times as much as it raised in its prior priced round last November.
BOND, the growth-stage company that Mary Meeker separated from Kleiner Perkins in 2018, spearheaded the investment. DN Capital, Dorsal Capital, Quiet Capital, Stanford Alumni Ventures, and Y Combinator via its Continuity Fund are some of the other key investors in the growth round.
Since its founding in 2017, the African firm, which debuted in Algeria, has now raised $193.25 million. Yassir considers itself the most valuable startup in North Africa and one of the highest-valued businesses in Africa and the Middle East, where it expects to grow in the upcoming months, despite the fact that its valuation is yet unknown.
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Why The Investors Invested
Since its founding, the firm has gained a lot of traction. The startup has 8 million users (about 2.5 times more than last year) and 100,000 partners made up of drivers, couriers, merchants, suppliers, and wholesalers, who are using its financial services.
One of these VC firms’ general partners, Daegwon Chae, stated that his company’s main investment in Yassir is based on the idea that technology will “rearchitect” how customers interact with food, financial services, and transportation around the world. “This investment is an extension of that belief in an underserved but dynamic, rapidly growing region. Emerging out of North Africa, the app has already become indispensable to users for critical aspects of their lives,” he added.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Yassir, an all-in-one ecosystem app, offers its consumers a one-stop shop for managing their daily activities, from getting to work to purchasing groceries and meals. Yassir is exploiting this network for its payments play, which includes a B2B e-commerce retail component that connects fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) suppliers with merchants, as well as the deployment of drivers and couriers as money agents.
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When CEO Noureddine Tayebi founded Yassir, the goal was to create a super app that included services that consumers in the French-speaking Maghreb region of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia had little or no access to on a single platform. So far, the execution has been flawless. Not only does the company provide ride-hailing and food and grocery delivery services (through Yassir Express) in 45 cities across six countries, but according to the research, the platform accounts for three out of every five on-demand activity in Algeria, its first market.
Yassir has come closer to its overall goal of offering banking and payments thanks to this calculated growth. According to Tayebi, offering on-demand services for food and transportation was the starting point that allowed Yassir to win consumers’ trust for this project. Tayebi claims that this is one of the reasons why the majority of Africans lack access to banking.
For context, consider that over 65% of Moroccans, one of Yassir’s key customers, do not have a bank account, and that 57% of Africans do not have any kind of bank account, per a 2018 McKinsey research on growth and innovation in retail banking. The report also notes that 40% of Africans who have access to banking prefer to transact online. In light of the fact that 50% of people in Africa have access to the internet, Yassir’s thesis holds that offering customers a mobile banking solution as part of a larger suite of services will satisfy a crucial need in that market.
“Our business model from day one was a super add model and getting into payments. When we first started, the observation was that most people were unbanked, and the number one reason is that people don’t trust the banking systems here for various reasons,” the chief executive said. “We thought we could provide on-demand services that solve immediate needs around where people spent their money. We knew if we executed well, we could have a large user base that subconsciously trusts us, which we felt was pertinent to offering payment services.”
“First, we want to create a local tech startup success model which will be emulated by others and more so Yassir team members. Second, we want to empower the local talent and, more importantly, the technical talent which often leaves the region, mainly to Europe, to pursue further studies or find jobs,” remarked the chief executive, who, after receiving a Ph.D. from Stanford and spent 15 years working at various organisations in Silicon Valley, returned to Algeria in 2016 to get active in the nation’s emerging tech landscape.
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As a result, the business plans to aggressively invest in its technical and product teams by tripling their size, at the very least, according to Tayebi, who started Yassir alongside Mahdi Yettou. He also emphasised how the money will help Yassir, which has offices in Algeria, Canada, France, Morocco, and Tunisia, to consolidate its growth, launch new services in the existing markets, and directly or through acquisitions expand into other regions throughout Africa and the Middle East.
“Although we like to consider ourselves as leaders in the Maghreb region, we’re just scratching the surface, and there’s still a lot of room to grow,” expressed the Silicon-Valley-based Algerian entrepreneur.
“In our first few years, we had a hard time raising money because of the region we operate in, despite us executing well,” he said. “That pushed us to be frugal and conscious of unit economics, profitability, and burn rate. And with the market shifts, we could still show that we had grown significantly with outstanding unit economics. So fundraising was easier because we grew so much that VC firms could not ignore us anymore.”
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Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh