Fatura, an Egypt based start-up, announced that it has closed a seven figure seed round led by Disruptech.
Disruptech is the Egypt’s first VC fund that focuses specifically on fintech start-ups. EFG EV and Cairo Angels also participated in the round.
About Fatura
Founded in 2019, Fatura is a B2B e-commerce platform linking fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) wholesalers to retailers. Fatura is an easy to use mobile application and gives its users access to a wide network of pre-vetted wholesalers. Through technology, it enables wholesalers offload their underutilized assets. Consequently, it helps in correcting supply side inefficiencies for all their stakeholders from wholesalers, manufacturers, and retailers. Fatura also provides a solution to plug the sector’s data gap by making market intelligence reports available to FMCGs.
Fatura hopes to leverage its asset-light business model to be the largest e-commerce platform in the continent.
Founders of Fatura
Cairo-based Fatura’s co-founders are Ahmed Anwar, Hossam Ali, and AbdAllah Mohebeldin and Ahmed Al Bakary.
“Egypt has more than 5,000 wholesalers, investing heavily to build another one will not solve the existing inefficiencies at scale,” said Hossam Ali. He further explained that Fatura’s mission is to “curate a network of 200-250 wholesalers across the country, digitally transform the way they work, and enable them to collectively lead the FMCG distribution business nationally.”
Ahmed Anwar claimed that Fatura will be “the first player to unlock the opportunity of digitizing the lending cycle.” This is crucial as 60% of the current wholesale market is through on-credit purchases in Egypt.
“The challenge manufacturers face in markets where the wholesale channel represents more than 50% of the ACV distribution, is how to ensure excellence of execution,” said Ahmed Al Bakary.
AbdAllah Moheb El-Din explained that their offering also includes analytics and intelligence reports for all the parties. “A major value of the platform is the market data analysis and the AI-enabled decision making based on it. We help FMCG manufacturers make better data-driven decisions and provide unprecedented transparency on prices and stock levels to retailers to maximize profits.”
In simple words, Fatura has taken the marketplace route as it doesn’t store the inventory and does not deliver. Instead, it focuses on getting the orders to existing wholesalers and having them ship these orders using their own fleet.
Statement from Disruptech
“We are excited to lead Fatura’s investment round and we firmly believe in the opportunity that lies in the digitisation of the wholesale-retail relationship,” said Okasha, Disruptech’s fund manager. He further added, “Disruptech sees Fatura playing an essential role to transform the market and we are committed to helping Fatura achieve its mission.”
Future plans
Fatura is working towards expanding into lending solutions. In a statement, the start-up said that it is on its way to offer working capital loans to retailers. The start-up also shared a timeline of when they’ll start offering these loans. However, it is going to leverage the data derived from transactions to analyse retailers’ behaviour and their creditworthiness.
