Jugnu brings in Sarmayacar as its first VC backer

Jugnu, a B2B e-commerce startup in Pakistan, has raised capital from Sarmayacar to grow its footprint in Lahore while also expanding to new cities. Jugnu’s founding team are second-time founders that have previously built a cloud-based SaaS business (Salesflo) that is the leading B2B sales and distribution platform in Pakistan’s FMCG market. Jugnu’s experience from having scaled Salesflo equips them with unparalleled information that has helped them develop deep insights into the complex problems within the distribution supply chain in Pakistan. The team can now leverage its knowledge and relationships with manufacturers to build an edge over competition.

“We have been studying the space closely for well over a year and are delighted to make our single largest investment in Jugnu, who we believe have the most sustainable competitive advantage owing to their solution centric approach, long-term orientation, and laser focus on finding the business model-market fit that will enable them to scale their offering throughout the country.” said Bernhard Klemen, General Partner at Sarmayacar.

This investment marks the first direct external investment into the business and will be used to target the offering to nearly a million kiryana store owners in Pakistan. Jugnu is putting the previously forgotten kiryana store-owner at the core of its product, some store owners were previously dealing with more than a 100 middle men to shop for nearly +2,000 SKUs and spent hours commuting to procure goods each month. Jugnu’s suite of technology applications are built to digitize every element in the retail supply chain, from the store owner placing an order conveniently on a mobile application all the way to the warehouse operations being tracked to eke out cost and time savings in procuring, sorting, stacking, and packing orders.

Over the last few months despite facing well-funded competition, Jugnu has demonstrated leading growth and retention metric while developing the largest retailer network in the cities in which it operates in a capital-efficient manner. This funding will help the company double-down on growing its retailer base and warehouse network in Lahore and expand to Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Karachi. Sharoon Saleem, Jugnu’s co-founder said: “SMEs form the backbone of Pakistan’s economy, we have watched this space grow and accelerated its digital evolution for over 6 years now — with Jugnu our aim is to positively impact livelihoods of the small and medium retailers through access to a wide catalog, reliable service and access to credit line. We are excited to partner with Sarmayacar, that shares our belief of laser focus on fundamentals and building a long term business with high impact.”