Souq.com raises record funding

Souq.com, a Mena-based ecommerce platform, has secured $75 million (Dh275.5m) in an additional round of funding from existing investor Naspers Limited, the firm announced in a media statement today.

This round of funding brings the total amount raised by Souq.com to $150 million (Dh551m) – the largest amount raised by any Internet-based business in the region, it said.

“We plan to use the funds to deepen our technology investment,” Ronaldo Mouchawar, Co-Founder and CEO, Souq.com, said in the statement. That includes an advanced mobile platform and enhancements to its delivery systems, Mouchawar added.

Souq.com has grown more than 10-fold in the past two years, the company said. The portal registers 23 million visits per month on its website, and has 6.2 million registered users, it noted. The site offers to sell products in more than 15 categories, from electronic gadgets to baby diapers in a combined retail and marketplace model.

A recent PayPal study shows that Mena is an attractive market for ecommerce, with an online penetration of more than 110m users, a market size that will reach $15 billion by 2015, of which 10 per cent are mobile transactions that are expected to grow six times in the next four years. The company claims that more than half (52 per cent) of all online shoppers in the UAE have shopped on Souq.com.

“We are changing the fundamentals of retail in the region and transforming how customers shop”, added Mouchawar.

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