We are leading a SAR 67.5 million ($18 million) investment round in Nana, the leading KSA-based online grocery marketplace. Our latest portfolio company delivers the new standard for grocery shopping.
Grocery is the second-largest spending bucket for households in Saudi Arabia. While this might not be surprising, what is surprising is that grocery shoppers in Saudi Arabia spend an average of 5.6 days every year commuting to and from grocery stores. That is equivalent to 5.6 months every 30 years spent —or, more accurately, wasted— entirely on the commute. Luckily, Nana offers its users the chance to win back the wasted commute time without compromising on the quality of the shopping experience. Needless to say, the opportunity for Nana to digitize the market is substantial, considering that the grocery market in Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt alone amounts to $83 billion.
According to the latest data reported by Delta Partners, only 0.1% of grocery sales in Saudi Arabia happened online. Compared to the global average of 1.8%, the market in Saudi Arabia stands to grow at least 18 times, illustrating the sizable opportunity to enable the market to reach its fair share. This is one of the main reasons we are excited about Nana.
Nana enables its customers to seamlessly order groceries from their favorite supermarkets or shops, choosing when to have them conveniently delivered right to their doorstep. What began as an experiment in 2016, when it was just a grocery shopping list app, grew into something truly astonishing: the leading online grocery marketplace in Saudi Arabia. Today, counting the likes of Panda and Carrefour among its partners, with presence in 14 cities and more than SAR 100m in total funding, Nana has proved its ability to lead the online grocery space across the wider region. We have the utmost confidence in Sami Alhulwah and the Nana team’s ability to execute on their ambitious expansion plans, backed by an intuitive app, first-rate technology and world-class operations.
Our co-investors in this round include Watar Partners, SVC, MEVP and Wamda, as well as existing angel investors.
On a more personal note, we are particularly proud to support Nana in light of the unfortunate COVID-19 outbreak. During this difficult time, Nana is prioritizing its social responsibility towards the community, ensuring that people have access to the food and supplies they need. In an effort to limit the need to go out and minimize people’s exposure to the COVID-19 contagion, Nana has tripled its capacity in just 10 days and is continuously increasing it further to ensure that all of the demand is met.