Iraq’s Lezzoo raises seven-figure seed to build a super-app for the country

Iraq’s Lezzoo raises seven-figure seed to build a super-app for the country

Ebril-based on-demand delivery startup Lezzoo has raised a seven-figure (USD) seed round, it told MENAbytes today. The round which is the largest for an Iraqi startup was led by New York & Baghdad-based frontier market investment firm Northern Gulf Partners and California-based Pay It Forward Venture Capital. Some angels from the United States and Latin America also took part in the round.

The funding announcement comes almost a year after Lezzoo graduated from Y Combinator. It was (and still is) the first (and only) Y Combinator-backed startup of Iraq.

Founded in early 2018 by Yadgar Merani, Rekar Botany & Ala Battal, Lezzoo has built super-app (using a three-sided marketplace model) that offers food, grocery, peer-to-peer, and medicine delivery, and on-demand laundry service across different cities of Northern Iraq. The startup that had started with food delivery has expanded its infrastructure around grocery delivery during the pandemic as a result of increased demand from the consumers.

The startup told us that they're the only player to have partnered with Carrefour, allowing customers to make purchases from the hypermarket through their platform.

Yadgar Merani, the co-founder and CEO of Lezzoo, in a conversation with MENAbytes said that they've onboarded different types of offline sellers across various