Moroccan B2B eCommerce Firm Chari Raises $5M

The Moroccan B2B eCommerce startup Chari.ma has raised $5 million in seed funding, valuing the firm at $70 million.

As Disrupt Africa reported Thursday (Oct. 7), the new funding sets the stage for Chari to expand into French-speaking Africa.

Founded in 2020 by the husband-and-wife team of Ismael and Sophia Belkhayat, Chari lets brick-and-mortar trailers in Morocco order products and have them delivered, working with more than 50% of Casablanca’s proximity stores.

North African retailers who work with Chari can order any consumer goods that they sell and have them delivered for free in under 24 hours. Chari also acts as a financial services provider for these stores, offering micro-credit facilities.

The seed funding round was co-led by Rocket Internet, Global Founders Capital and P1 Ventures, with a long list of participating investors that included Plug and Play, Y Combinator, Village Capital, MetLife Foundation and Orange Ventures.

“We have carefully selected the VCs of this seed round based on their ability to help us build a great business,”  said Ismael Belkhayat. “We are now focusing on achieving our short-term targets to raise a significant Series A in six to nine months.”

In addition to its expansion, Chari says it also hopes to embed financial services such as digital payment, money transfer and BNPL into its product.

Read more: Morocco’s eCommerce Startup Chari.ma Acquires Mobile Credit Book App

In August, Chari announced it had acquired Karny.ma, a company that helped about 15,000 convenience stores use smartphones to manage credit arrangements with customers.

“Karny.ma users are the right target for Chari,” Ismael Belkhayat said at the time. “We believe there can be many synergies between the two apps, and we want to grow both in parallel with the end goal of starting to offer financial services to all of our customers.”