Morocco’s Chari valued at $100M in bridge round as it looks to pilot BNPL services

A bridge round has been secured for the startup, which is a B2B e-commerce and retail startup.

New investors in the bridge round were Khwarizmi Ventures, Air Angels and the venture capital arm of AKWA Group.

They joined the existing investors who invested in the $5 million seed round last October.

Like many startup in the B2B e-commerce space across the continent, Chari is playing in the FMCG sector.

Small retailers in these two countries can order products from partnering multinational and local manufacturers and get them in less than 24 hours.

The company acquired a ledger book in October. About 50,000 merchants are served by the platform. Merchants can handle the credit they give to their clients.

The startup raises $5 million at a valuation of $70 million.

The bridge round fits into the strategy of providing payment facilities. The company is in a good position to offer financial services to its retailers.

The money from this bridge round will be used to test the services with existing customers. After successful results, the company will acquire a local credit company to enable shop owners to lend money to their end- users and further grow their business.

It is possible for Chari to credit-assess the unbanked shop owners, determining the most applicable payment terms to give each, thanks to the data provided by Karny.

In essence, the data from Karny allows Chari to find out about the items that the shop owners have sold to their end clients. Through its internal closed-loop digital wallet, Chari will now offer payment terms and options to some of its shop owners based on their date of registration, order frequency, average basket order and amount of money lent to their end consumers.

A few shop owners have been selected to test run this. Merchants can have a negative balance on their digital wallet, but they can't have more than 30 days without charge.

The service will be expanded to Tunisia and other French-speaking countries in Africa once it is up and running.

The rapid penetration of e- commerce and the effects of the Pandemic have led to strong growth in Africa.

Nigeria's Carbon Zero, South Africa's Payflex, and Kenya's LipaLater are some of the services that cater to consumers. Some make infrastructural plays like Nigeria's ThankUCash, while others serve businesses like TradeDepot, a Nigerian company.

Most of the players have raised debt financing for their initiatives. But Chari didn't. The reason was that the debt venture funds wanted to charge the company 15% in interest rates.

Since this is a pilot, I prefer to raise the money from funds that can help me with my strategy. He said that he gets a little bit of a discount, but that he gets a lot of help from experienced founders. Once the pilot is over, I will need more funding for my working capital requirement and will need to raise debt.