The $6.75 million pre-Series B funding round for Taager, the top social e-commerce platform in the MENA region, was completed. Norrsken22, an Africa-focused tech growth fund, led the round.The company will be able to support its expansion in the Middle East with this round.
Along with all current investors, including 4DX Ventures, RAED Ventures, BECO Capital, and Breyer Capital, Endeavor Catalyst and Beltone VC also participated in the oversubscribed round.
Social e-commerce, or the practice of directly purchasing and selling goods via social media platforms, has developed over the last 20 years from a simple idea to a well-known shopping technique that is on the verge of replacing traditional retail.
By 2025, social e-commerce is expected to generate $2.5 trillion in revenue worldwide. It has already exceeded $14 billion in the MENA region alone, making up more than 30% of all e-commerce sales as of right now. Because social sellers are trustworthy, product selection and marketing are culturally relevant, and social media is already widely used as a distribution channel, social e-commerce has succeeded where traditional e-commerce has failed in these areas.
A sizable and rapidly expanding population of young people who are digital natives and who wish to enter this market are found in the MENA region. The inability to reach a geographically diverse consumer base, complicated supply chains, a lack of funding, and a lack of data or insights to run a profitable business are all challenges faced by social sellers when they start and grow their businesses. In order to address this, Taager offers social sellers an end-to-end platform that includes a trending product catalogue, data and insights into pricing and marketing optimization, end-to-end logistics, integrated financing for inventory purchases, multi-market payment collection, and tools to maximize their business and profitability.
Taager’s ultimate goal is to establish itself as the primary data and demand generation platform for social e-commerce in the MENA area.
With thousands of merchants and products serving millions of their end users, Taager’s technology teams are in the best position to leverage the unique and proprietary data points gathered over the years of the social e-commerce ecosystem. By means of machine learning applications, they can assist their merchants with intelligent product matching and bundling, as well as forecast and segment the end-user profile and delivery rate, thereby increasing the merchants’ profits.
In order to serve more merchants and end users with the same and lower CAPEX requirements, Taager is also leveraging the latest developments in generative AI and expanding its scalable operations platform with AI sales agents.
Mohamed Elhorishy, Taager’s co-founder and CEO, says, “Our mission is to enable absolutely anyone to start and scale a profitable social e-commerce business. We empower women, young people, and low-income earners—and in a way that is sustainable for both us and them. Taager has, on average, increased the profitability of their merchants by 2.5x. We’re extremely proud that Taager has transformed the lives of our social sellers. This platform has helped thousands of people to achieve a stable income, secure financial independence and pay off debts.”
Taager has provided services to more than 45,000 online social sellers as of right now. This funding will help the company grow in the MENA region by enabling them to scale their skilled workforce, increase their product selection, and further develop their data insights and social seller tools.
“Taager has created its own category, which means we have had to spend the past five years building social commerce fundamentals from the ground up. In the past two years, we have refined the business, becoming more capital efficient and scalable and improved our core unit economics. Now it’s time to scale. We have laid the groundwork to enable us to grow five times within the next few years,” Elhorishy added.
Nivesh Pather, Principal at Norrsken22, says, “Taager is redefining e-commerce in the MENA region by empowering thousands of entrepreneurs with the tools, insights, and infrastructure to build and scale their businesses. This team has been exceptional in being able to successfully navigate scaling into multiple markets profitably, including Saudi Arabia. We are excited to be partnering with Mohamed and his team on Taager’s next phase of growth.”
