Egypt-Based B2B eCommerce Firm Kuzlo Raises Pre-Seed Funding

Egyptian B2B eCommerce startup Kuzlo announced Friday (Oct. 29) it has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-seed fundraising round that is now closed, according to a Tech in Africa report.

Nama Ventures led Kuzlo’s funding round, which will give the company more capital to help small retailers in the fast-moving consumer goods space with wholesalers in their area.

Kuzlo CEO Ayman Elgarem sees digitization as a “main driver for the transformation of many industrial sectors and the B2B marketplace in Egypt,” he told Tech in Africa.

Mohammed Alzubi, Managing Partner of Nama Ventures, said the investment in Kuzlo is “part of our investment thesis.”

Related: Egypt’s Central Bank OKs Merchant Licenses for Contactless Payments

Last month, Egypt’s central bank rolled out licenses that allow merchants to accept contactless payments from mobile phones, although it didn’t say when the new system will take effect or which businesses will be eligible for licenses.

Egypt passed its Data Protection Law in July of 2020, inspired by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, triggering new guidelines for how businesses in Egypt can process and store customer data digitally and is designed to spark the growth of online banking in the market.

It imposes penalties on companies that don’t stick to online privacy rules concerning digital and electronic data storage.

Egypt also recently passed a law allowing the central bank to give banking licenses to FinTech companies and is crafting legislation that would govern non-banking FinTech such as nano-finance, consumer tech and insurance tech.

Also read: Egypt’s Capiter Nets $33M for Expansion Across MENA

Last month, Cairo-based startup Capiter announced it had raised $33 million in a Series A funding round to expand its B2B eCommerce platform to Egypt, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region by 2022. Capiter has more than 50,000 merchants and 1,000 sellers in its customer base and can customize its application to each buyer’s needs.

The company is developing a machine learning model to let merchants know which items they need to buy next to keep their inventory up to date.