A digital wholesale platform for social sellers & retailers, Zarya will use this pre-seed round to expand its team and scale its offering.
Zarya, a B2B platform for small sellers in Pakistan, today announced it has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding, led by Raed Ventures, an early-stage investor in the MENA region, with additional participation from international and local investors Fatima Gobi Ventures, U.S.-based Class 5 Global, Global Founders Capital, and Egyptian social commerce startup Taager.
Headquartered in Lahore, Pakistan, Zarya aims to eliminate the friction smaller scale sellers face in sourcing products, arranging delivery and collecting payment. This allows sellers to maximize their earnings by freeing up time to focus on sales. Zarya plans to use the investment to broaden its supply offering while maintaining reliability.
Many of Zarya’s customers are housewives looking to earn additional income. Currently, Zarya lists over 3,000 different items, of which a significant portion includes women’s and children’s clothing. The platform is expanding its catalogue to include new categories like abayas,shoes, socks, home textiles and makeup.
Zarya’s founding team is made up of brothers Faisal and Saad Zahid. Faisal is a former director of product management at Careem, which was acquired by Uber for $3.1 billion, and most recently Saudi Arabia grocery startup Nana. Saad led operations for several businesses in Pakistan ranging from industrial scale farms to steel manufacturing.
“Raed sees the social commerce space growing rapidly in the MENAP region,” said Wael Nafee, Principal at Raed Ventures. “Similar markets such as India, China and LATAM are showing early signs of its potential. Zarya’s early commercial traction and product value in Pakistan demonstrate its strong ability to deliver the experience that independent sellers need. Raed is thrilled to partner with Zarya and its team.”
The funds from Raed Ventures and others will enable Zarya to broaden its supply offering while maintaining reliability. They believe being successful at scale will require robust supply chain and process automation to ensure the service is reliable and remains customer centric.
Commenting on the size of the opportunity, co-founder Faisal Zahid said, “Pakistan has over 100 million YouTube and 45 million Facebook users. Pakistan’s social media users are spending more than 3 hours per day on social media apps. If you’re spending so much time online, it’s quite natural to start buying and selling while on social media apps. We aim to give our Sellers every opportunity to thrive in this environment.”
About Zarya
Zarya is a digital wholesale platform for social sellers & retailers. The company is headquartered in Lahore, Pakistan and was launched by founders Faisal Zahid and Saad Zahid. It has raised $1.7M from Raed Ventures, Class 5 Global, Fatima Gobi Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and Taager. To learn more about Zarya, visit