Dubai-settled eyewear startup Eyewa has raised $21 million in a Series B co-drove by Kingsway Capital and Nuwa Capital, it declared in an articulation today. The arrangement was additionally joined by French Partners, Endeavor Catalyst, Derayah Ventures, Palm Drive, and Hardy Capital, and takes Eyewa’s all out capital raised to date to about $30 million. It had previously raised $7.5 million Series An in 2019 and $1.1 million in a seed round in 2018.
Mehdi Oudghiri and Anass Boumediene who previously drove Foodpanda in the Middle East began Eyewa in 2017 with the aim to build the biggest tech-empowered eyewear organization in the region. It began as an online retailer selling shades, contact focal points, and prescription glasses in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and has now advanced into an omnichannel player that additionally includes in-house brands. Its web based business stage currently additionally offers to clients in Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait. The startup revealed to MENAbytes that it has multiplied its year-over-year income in the ongoing quarter.
Eyewa kicked off its retail expansion earlier this year by opening its first brick-and-mortar store in Dahran, Saudi Arabia. It has since opened two additional stores in Jeddah and plans to add many more across every one of the significant cities in Saudi and UAE in the following not many months.
The move may have come as a surprise for many in the region as it’s uncommon to see online players here extend to offline. For Eyewa, notwithstanding, it was the arrangement from the earliest starting point, “It has consistently been essential for our vision to in the end turn into an omnichannel retailer,” its prime supporter and CEO Mehdi Oudghiri told MENAbytes. Explaining why they’ve been interested in going offline, he said, “We need to be pretty much as close as possible to our clients. We began as an internet business organization since that is the place where the biggest market hole was, as nobody was offering high-quality and reasonable eyewear items online with a decent client experience. Expanding our compass to offline will supplement our solid online presence and concrete our position as a leading part in the eyewear industry.”
The omnichannel model has functioned admirably for different eyewear new companies across the world. Warby Parker, an American direct-to-shopper eyewear brand was esteemed at $3 billion in its latest financing, and India-based Lenskart that began in 2010 as an internet business stage for eyewear and now additionally works more than 500 retail stores the nation over, raised assets at an announced valuation of $1.5 billion, in 2019.
So Eyewa’s move into retail bodes well however it implies that it is going straight on with many established offline players with an enormous retail presence across the region. Its prime supporter and co-CEO Anass Boumediene contends that their store idea is different (from the traditional retailers) at multiple levels, “We offer an omnichannel experience, and integrate virtual take a stab at in the stores for trying out items not displayed in the store and items that by and large can’t be tried (shading contact focal points). Eyewa likewise has exclusive in-house brands and collections that are made to fit the necessities and needs of our nearby audiences. It permits us to offer high-quality items at a significantly lower price point than similar items.”
The in-house marks that the startup has built include lifestyle eyewear line 30Sundays, fast fashion collection Blackout, and regular shading contact focal points range Layala. Every one of them fulfills the undiscovered requirements of the neighborhood market, noticed the startup in an articulation.
In addition to expanding further into its existing business sectors, Eyewas is presently additionally exploring the opportunity in different business sectors of the Middle East and North Africa. It intends to utilize the furthest down the line assets to execute these expansion designs, and invest in “top-tier innovation and item groups, just as top tier retail and omnichannel innovation.”
Khaled Talhouni, Managing Partner of Nuwa Capital, commenting on the advancement Eyewa has made up until now, said, “We’ve been working with Anass and Mehdi since the beginning of their excursion and it is such a privilege to have a fantastic view to the improvement of an organization as amazing as Eyewa. A big piece of our thesis at Nuwa Capital is to zero in on the following evolution of retail. The juncture of offline, online, and private name driven trade is at the heart of this thesis, and we would be unable to find a group that has executed just as Eyewa has on this idea in the region.
