Rider, a Pakistani logistics startup, stated on Monday that it had raised $3.1 million in a funding round sponsored by a number of investors, bringing the total amount raised since September 2021 to $5.4 million.
YCombinator led the round, which included new investors such as i2i Ventures, Flexport, Soma Capital, and Rebel Fund. Existing investors such as Global Founders Capital, Fatima Gobi Ventures (FGV), and TPL E-ventures, as well as famous angel investor Arash Ferdowsi (Co-Founder Dropbox), participated in the round, according to the business.
The Karachi-based B2B2C firm revealed last year that it had secured $2.3 million in a pre-seed round. It was founded in 2019 by Salman Allana, who was previously head of strategy and business development at UPS Pakistan and assistant vice president at Citibank.
Since then, the company claims that monthly revenues have increased by 110 percent, and the number of online merchants has doubled to 650. In a statement, it claimed, “Rider has now successfully completed the delivery of over 3 million parcels across 60 cities in Pakistan,”
“Rider has been establishing a network of sorting hubs, urban delivery centres, and a digitised fleet to provide next-day ‘Amazon-like’ delivery service to online vendors in Pakistan. The Rider platform provides delivery agents with route optimization, purchasers with live tracking and scheduling, and sellers with a highly digitised warehouse function “Added the statement.
Rider was created, according to Allana, since traditional courier businesses in Pakistan were “were failing to capture the online buying trend” because they were not set up to service the e-commerce market.
“Rider intends to improve Pakistan’s e-commerce marketplace with solutions and infrastructure that go beyond logistics,” he stated.
In 2021, Pakistan’s startup sector had its strongest year yet, with 81 agreements worth $350 million reported. The total sum raised was $65 million, which was more than 5 times what was raised in 2020.