Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV) has provided Chari with additional finance in the amount of US$1.5 million in order to assist the company’s expansion plan.
Chari is a B2B e-commerce firm established in Morocco that offers embedded financing for the FMCG industry.
Ismael and Sophia Belkhayat, a husband-and-wife duo, established Chari in 2020 with the goal of enabling traditional store owners in Morocco to order things and have them delivered to their locations. Over 20,000 food businesses in Morocco have joined the network since it was launched, and it has already spread to Tunisia and Ivory Coast.
The startup, which took part in the Y Combinator S21 batch, completed a seed round of funding worth US$5 million in late 2021, and it was able to get more investment in January of the previous year. In February, it received an additional one million United States dollars from Orange Ventures, which is Orange’s venture capital investment arm. In June, it announced that it would get follow-on funding from Plug and Play.
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Chari’s achievements
Chari has already established itself as the leading B2B e-commerce platform for FMCG products in Morocco. The company has a clear vision to become a regional player and build additional services, which will provide the company with opportunities to capture further market share and create additional revenue streams such as embedded fintech.
Chari has demonstrated strong traction in the market, and it has already established itself as the leading B2B e-commerce platform for FMCG products in Morocco. Recently, the company made history by being the first venture capital-backed firm in Morocco to be granted a payment licence by the Central Bank of Morocco.
VKAV was established in 2021 as a joint venture between Kepple Africa Ventures (KAV), a Japanese venture capital business, and Verod Holdings (Verod), an African growth capital private equity firm. It has already banked an extra $1.5 million in cash from VKAV.
The company made the announcement in March that it had collected US$43 million for its pan-African venture fund, which makes investments in scalable, tech-enabled, post-revenue firms that are attempting to address severe challenges on the continent. The announcement was spearheaded by partners Satoshi Shinada, Ryosuke Yamawaki, and Ory Okolloh.
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Remarks from Chari’s founders
“We are thrilled to onboard VKAV as our partner as we establish a cutting-edge and fundamental financial services infrastructure for the mass market in our country. With VKAV’s extensive network across Africa and profound connections with the Japanese corporate society, we believe they will consistently bring value to our endeavours,” said Ismael Belkhayat.
Ryosuke Yamawaki, who will join Chari’s board of directors, stated that Chari was in a unique position to alter the informal retail sector and redefine the category of informal trade in Africa. Chari is set to join Chari later this year.
“We firmly believe that their innovative approach will benefit the local market and serve as a showcase to the rest of the world,” he said.