The African tech ecosystem has witnessed a significant leap in recent years. The burgeon has been pillared by the fintech sector that has attracted more than $2.5 billion in investments in 2021 alone. But recently, transport startups have been revving to fintech, raising millions of dollars in funding.
Algerian ride-hailing startup, Yassir, has announced that it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round to build an African Super app.
The investment round was graced by notable investors and VCs such as WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike Ventures, Quiet Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, VentureSouq, Nellore Capital and Moving Capital. Also participating are angel investors such as Cleo Sham of Uber; Thomas Layton of Upwork, Opentable and Metaweb; Rohan Monga of Gojek; and Hannes Graah of Spotify and Revolut.
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This is coming a few weeks after Nigeria’s shared-mobility startups Treepz and Shuttlers raised $1.6 million seed each to expand their services in Africa.
Yassir was founded in 2017 by CEO Noureddine Tayebi and Mahdi Yettou as a ride-hailing business, designed to serve densely populated places that have been impacted by inefficient transportations. But it has since then onboarded a host of other services including last-mile delivery services, creating an ecosystem of related services bringing drivers, couriers, merchants, suppliers and wholesalers and individual users on one platform.
Tayebi says the plan is to use the marketplace model to offer payment services to all parties involved and create a super app in the process.
The company says it intends to use the new funds to consolidate its growth in its existing markets by launching new products and improving existing ones. It also plans to increase its engineering team.
Tayebi told TechCrunch in an interview that the plan is to offer many service to the underserved.
“Our approach of solving the unbanked population problem is unique in the region by offering more of a ‘banking as a platform’ solution where daily services are at the heart of it all via a super-app marketplace.
“Such services not only build trust for all the sides of the marketplace but also use them as channels to offer these payment services, which we think is the approach that is most suited to the region. Most of our competitors are either on-demand services — ride-hailing or last-mile delivery only — or pure payment solutions. This gives us an edge over them as we build the network, the channels and the trust that are all key ingredients for the adoption of payment services at large scale,” he said.
Yassir was the first Algerian startup to get into the Y Combinator accelerator program (Winter batch) in 2020, receiving $150,000 in seed funding. It has recorded tremendous growth visible in its customer-base. Yassir now has more than 2 million users and 40,000 partners and is available in 25 cities across Algeria, Canada, France, Morocco and Tunisia and is continuously expanding.
The startup’s growth is gradually putting Algeria in the map of African countries pulling in huge investments from their tech ecosystems.