Jahez International announced the successful closing of its Series A round of funding, led by Impact46, marking the largest VC deal of its kind in Saudi Arabia so far this year. A 137 million SAR transaction entailing primary and secondary shares, all funded by private investors. The deal signals strong investors interest in investing in growth stage VC companies.
Jahez operates a food delivery platform offering a full logistics solution with its own proprietary delivery capabilities. Saudi Arabia witnessed an unprecedented leapfrog in its online food delivery market for the past few years, reaching ~ SAR4.4billion in 2019. Saudi customers’ expectations also increased, keeping the bar high on quality of service and making the challenge more interesting for platforms.
Jahez, founded in 2016, is a Saudi startup utilizing technology to streamline its online food delivery management software, the system can integrate any merchant with its proprietary remote onboarding mobile application. The platform automates the inbound order flow through a single point, given by Jahez, and provides last mile delivery service as well. A pillar to the model’s success is the partnership approach towards stakeholders.
Jahez has demonstrated their ability to rise above the competition and create long-term relationships with its stakeholders (restaurants, couriers, and end users’ “customers”) through an innovative business model. The startup has a team of 180 people, who are spread across major urban cities like Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam and other 19 cities. The company will use the fresh funds to support further development of information technology, new products & services, and solidify its position in Saudi Arabia. The success story of Jahez carries with it a national pride, a Saudi company launched by Saudi management and staff with more than 90% of Saudization.
To address the impact of COVID-19, over the past few months Jahez has been on a mission to help restaurants and merchants rapidly pivot into online ordering, following the closure of restaurants dine-in services. Jahez itself started offering new services to cope with the situation and offered its delivery capabilities to grocery stores and other non-food retailers. So far, Jahez has processed more than 20 million orders for leading household brands such as McDonald’s, Burger king, Pizza Hut, SACO, Whites Pharmacies, always keeping customers happy by delivering directly to their doorstep.
The company is well on its way to exceed a billion riyal of orders value in 2020 sourced from over 12,000 points of sales across the kingdom. Jahez proudly serves 3 million users through its partners fleet of 15,000 freelance couriers. Jahez has plans to expand into cloud-kitchens, groceries and non-food ecommerce services.
According to Jahez CEO and co-founder Eng. Ghassab Al-Mandil, “Our starting point when creating Jahez was to give restaurants the tools they need to remain competitive in a digital world. In the current climate in particular, we help restaurants, supermarkets, pharmacies, and other retailers gain access to a new digital channel and generate revenue by selling through jahez.” Yet, “We want to continue to bring convenience, choice and reliability to our users as we fulfil our mission”. “With this funding round, we will further invest in building differentiated offerings, plugging the white spaces in the ecosystem, expanding in new verticals and developing our in-house technology, while keeping excellent customer experience at the core.”
Abdulaziz Al Omran, from Impact46, also commented: “Jahez’s management team has an entrepreneurial spirit that makes miracles happen, they grew from a small departmental team to where they are today in less than 3 years. Seeing how the team has stepped up during the lockdown to help many restaurants and grocery stores offer delivery services in a matter of hours has only reinforced our conviction that this start-up is something special.”
The round was led by Impact46’s Growth VC Fund, supporting later stage technology startups and aiming to play a role in boosting their growth, unlocking new milestones, and expanding reach for startups looking to scale.
