Syarah, an online marketplace for cars, closes its Bridge to B round of investment, for an undisclosed amount, with participation from Impact46 and an angel investor.
What started out as a cars listing website back in 2015, is quickly turning into one of the largest auto marketplaces in Saudi Arabia. Syarah is not only a used car listing today, but has rather expanded into offering new and used cars for both dealers and individuals, generating Mojaz car history reports for used cars, facilitating car financing, and has marked itself to be the go-to online channel for both individual sellers and traditional auto showrooms.
The team behind Syarah didn’t stop there, their commitment to digitizing the highly fragmented automobile market in the region have led them to launch a new service called “Syarah Online”. Syarah Online allows the end user to buy their car completely online and have the car shipped and delivered to their doorstep, offering the full process online without the need to contact or visit a dealer showroom. With the right partners, Syarah also offers complimentary services including: selling warranties and extended warranties for cars, selling insurance, and roadside service (AAA).
Syarah has around 300 active dealers from across the kingdom, and has sold more than 1800 cars online since last year. Led by Salah Sharef and Fayez Alanazi, a strong complimentary team of serial entrepreneurs with a great track record of founding a leading Arabic online classifieds/marketplace. The team combines both technical expertise and business savviness.
Co-Founder and CEO Salah Sharef, said “Syarah Online is on a mission to disrupt and reshape the way cars are bought and sold in the region. Our new partnership with Impact46 will help us greatly towards achieving this goal. It will help us to improve our product offering and to better serve our users with a wider range of services.”
Also co-founder and CMO, Fayez Alanazi added, that “the partnership will open up new opportunities for innovation for Syarah, and this will help in creating new services for facilitating car buy and selling in the kingdom. It will also help the Syarah team to continue enhancing it’s existing services, and to better execute future plans for improving the user experience and improving the quality of service and safety in the market.”
The use of this round will be focused on Increasing sales, expanding to new cities, Increasing inventory of used cars, and Integrating with financial institutions to offer auto financing leases. “Saudi Arabia is the largest automotive market in MENA accounting to ~40% of total car sales. Syarah is well positioned to take the market not only by being one of the very first movers, but also by uniquely utilizing their expertise to hone the opportunities in this underserved space. In the past couple of months alone, we’ve seen great growth on our investment. Only a team like Salah And Fayez can turn what might seem like an ‘economically off-season’ to an all time record of online car sales.” Noted Kholoud Almohammadi from the Impact46 Team.
