Brandverse – Pakistan’s leading startup that is solving for the profitable and sustainable growth of small businesses by democratizing access to e-commerce, announced that it has closed a multi-million dollar investment seed round led by the JS Group. The round also saw follow-on participation from seed investors, regional family offices & operator angels.
The company also announced the appointment of, former Group COO of TCS, Faizan Siddiqi, as Co-founder & Managing Director, to support the next stage of Brandverse’s growth and expansion into foreign markets.
With this round Brandverse will further strengthen its Chikoo app which enables both offline, hyper-local and on-demand e-commerce across the retail value chain. Chikoo is the e-commerce enablement platform for small businesses that is bringing neighborhood stores, at-home entrepreneurs and general traders to realize the promise of e-commerce, without the expense or capability requirements normally associated with going online. Chikoo enables any business, selling anything, anywhere, to start selling online, in less than 1 minute, with nothing more than a smartphone and internet connection.
Raza Matin, CEO of Brandverse said: “We knew we would witness massive adoption of the internet and technology by Pakistani small businesses and founded Brandverse because we wanted to play our part in redefining the nation’s growth story through this transformation. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the criticality of this shift for Pakistan’s smaller businesses, as competition in the last mile intensifies. We are also incredibly excited to welcome onboard Faizan, who will supercharge our growth efforts, as he has done so many times before.”
With Brandverse’s Chikoo app, a retailer can be online and ready to go in less than 1 mins, and start selling their existing in-store inventory backed by the Brandverse product data engine that has already codified over 100k domestic retail products, and provides access to a further 300 million international products, that can be added to any store by simply scanning a barcode of the product with the seller’s camera phone.
Founded in 2018, Brandverse aims to create the best-in-class solutions for the next-generation of e-commerce in Pakistan – one that is both hyper-local and on-demand. Realizing that there was a massive gap and need in the market for product content, Brandverse has created the largest database of high quality, digital product content assisting some of Pakistan’s leading retail businesses and platforms on their digitization journey.
