Saudis’ Salla raises $8.5 million Series A to help people build and run online stores

Saudis’ Salla raises $8.5 million Series A to help people build and run online stores

Makkah-based ecommerce enablement platform Salla has raised $8.5 million in a Series A round led by STV with the participation of existing investors Vision Ventures and Raed Ventures, it announced in a statement to MENAbytes today. It had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Vision Ventures and Raed Ventures in a seed round in 2018.

Founded in 2016 by Nawaf Hariri and Salman Butt, Salla's Shopify-like platform enables users to easily set up their web and mobile-based online stores in Arabic. It is one of the first ecommerce enablement platforms to have come out of Saudi and has helped over 10,000 merchants process 8 million orders with a GMV of $533 million to date.

Salla claims that the GMV of orders it has processed is the highest in the region (in this category) and makes it the leading and fastest-growing ecommerce enablement platform of the Middle East & North Africa.

The SaaS startup uses a freemium model to offer its platform to merchants with its paid tiers starting from SAR 99 ($26). It doesn't take a cut from the sales of the stores of both free and paid users. The paid tiers include come with an advanced set of features including the