STV leads $8.5 million Series A funding round into Makkah-based Salla

Salla, a Makkah-based start-up that helps companies to set up Arabic e-commerce stores, plans to expand its services across the Middle East and North Africa region after securing $8.5 million through a Series A funding.

The fundraising was led by STV, the venture capital arm of Saudi Telecom Company, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. It also included participation from Salla’s existing investors Raed Ventures and Vision Ventures, both of whom are based in the kingdom.

The start-up will invest the fresh capital in developing its product and expanding within Saudi Arabia and across the wider region.

“We are happy to have STV on board in our journey, as we continue to grow our proposition across the region,” Salman Butt, co-founder and chief operating officer of the company, said.

“We believe that our easy-to-use platform, coupled with our Arabic offering and our flexible subscription plans, sets us apart from our competitors … with STV and our previous investors, we are confident that we will be able to capture an even larger part of the market,” he added.

Founded in 2016, Salla helps companies to set up e-commerce stores, offering a range of payment, shipping and logistics services.

It has processed eight million orders through its platform and more than $533m of transactions measured by gross merchandise value through more than 10,000 online stores.

“We are incredibly excited to partner with Salla … it is our first investment in the space. Our thesis is based on the move towards software-enabled e-commerce, more than the digitisation of traditional commerce,” said Ahmad Alshammari, partner at STV.

“Salla is not only enabling the creation and launch of new businesses with ease, but is building the backbone of the thriving e-commerce market in the region,” he added.

The e-commerce market in the Mena region is growing at an annual rate of 25 per cent, according to a report by Bain & Company and Google. The GCC and Egypt account for 80 per cent of the market and have been growing at a rate of about 30 per cent per year, more than twice as fast as the rest of the region.

Salla offers inventory management and marketing tools, as well as detailed reports on store performance and automatic invoices for orders that allow e-commerce merchants to set up, maintain and increase sales without any fees or commissions, Nawaf Hariri, co-founder and chief executive of Salla, said.

“Due to a variety of payment and logistic partnerships, e-commerce store owners who are using Salla do not have to worry about payment or delivery challenges once their store goes live … it is all taken care of,” he added.