Egyptian social commerce startup Brimore raises $25M

 The opportunity in the market can be attributed to the growth in online social sellers in the country, over 1.25 million them, helping little-known brands sell and distribute their goods via different networks.

Brimore–a market leader in the country and, to an extent, Africa–off the back of witnessing impressive growth in the last three years, has raised $25 million in a Series A round. The company was founded by Mohamed Abdulaziz and Ahmed Sheikha in 2017.

While working in the FMCG business, both founders witnessed how difficult it was for emerging brands to get their products to the mass market due to the dominance of established brands, who, for the most part, had built distribution infrastructure for themselves over the years.

On the other end, thousands of individuals, particularly women and stay-at-home moms, wanted to start their e-commerce shops but had no clue how to go about it, nor did they have products to sell.

“We started working on Brimore with the mindset of actually manufacturing products ourselves. However, producing our products wasn’t the wisest decision at that time as it was a very asset-heavy model,” said CEO Abdulaziz to TechCrunch in an interview.

“So we started scaling with listing different products. And at the same time, it was very insightful to see how the network formed on the other side. From a seller perspective, we started onboarding more and more sellers. Most of them happen to be women.”

Brimore connects both worlds via an app as an omnichannel social commerce platform. So, small and medium-sized suppliers could give these individuals–who double as sellers and word-of-mouth marketers–access to these emerging products. This way, these manufacturers have advertising and marketing on lock while these sellers start their e-commerce businesses and earn extra cash.