With the $9.6 million in funding it recently received, Mylerz, a Cairo-based e-commerce fulfillment startup, intends to grow into three new markets in North Africa and advance across Egypt over the next three months.
The startup also has its sights set on East Africa’s growing e-commerce market, with the great goal of becoming a pan-African shipping logistics provider by leveraging Africa’s e-commerce market, which has grown at an annual rate of 18 percent since 2014.
Lorax Capital Partners, an Egypt-based private equity firm, drove the Mylerz expansion funding round, which also included Fawry, one of Egypt’s largest e-payment companies.
Fawry, Mylerz’s payments partner, will join the company as it grows into Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, providing electronic payment and cash collection services.
Gharaibeh launched Mylerz in November 2019, drawing on his 23-year career at Aramex, a multinational logistics and fulfillment company based in the United Arab Emirates, where he most recently served as the head of Africa.
According to Mylerz Founder and CEO Samer Gharaibeh, the startup’s immediate plan is to increase across Egypt, creating markets and fostering cross-border trade for its customers.
The startup has the right partners to help it achieve its goals and expand its end-to-end logistics platform.
Fawry’s investment in Mylerz, according to Ashraf Sabry, CEO, is part of the company’s effort to create an interconnected commerce ecosystem in Egypt and examine international growth prospects with solid partners like Mylerz and Lorax.
The Mylerz platform enables its partners to track orders in transit, change delivery destinations or times, and generate business insights such as consumer habits and demographics.
According to the company, it makes same-day deliveries for hundreds of its partners.
Mylerz has 21 fulfillment centers, according to Gharaibeh, and plans to open a 25,000-square-foot hub, its largest to date, to cater to the increasing need for storage, order processing, and last-mile deliveries.
According to Gharaibeh, the fulfillment hubs are scattered out to guarantee that they are close to customers for quick deliveries. Mylerz has delivered over 2 million packages to date.
Techbuild’s Take
African e-commerce players have focused their efforts on overcoming last-mile challenges. That is, making products accessible to customers at all times and in all places, thanks to e-commerce.
E-commerce vendors in some markets are still having trouble winning consumers’ confidence with efficient delivery due to unpredictable timelines but this is changing. And the only strategy to beat in this region is to create a model that uses this sector to deliver last-mile services.
Thanks to a few online platforms like Mylerz, the e-commerce industry in Africa has been growing in recent years. However, getting the product from the transportation hub to the customer location, known as last-mile delivery in the industry, is a big hindrance that many of these platforms are innovatively solving.
Mylerz also has a fleet of more than 350 environmentally friendly vehicles that run on compressed natural gas (CNG).
These vehicles have a higher initial cost than conventional vehicles, but this is offset by their lower fuel consumption.
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