Saudi’s Saee raises $2.4 million Series A for its last-mile delivery platform

Jeddah-based last-mile delivery startup Saee has raised $2.4 million in a Series round from Business Incubators & Accelerators Company (BIAC), Tasheel Holding, and Abunayyan Holding’s investment arm ABN Ventures, it announced today in a statement to MENAbytes.

Founded in 2016 by Eihab Nassier, Tariq Alturkestani, and a few others, Saee had originally started as Kasper Cab, a monthly subscription-based ride-hailing network for women in Saudi, but pivoted in 2017 to become a logistics platform to offer last-mile delivery service to ecommerce businesses in Saudi, using the same network of drivers it had built for Kasper Cab.

According to an explainer video on Saee’s website, it offers same-day shipping to ecommerce platforms for within the city shipments and three-day shipping for out of city deliveries. The website states that the startup has branches in Riyadh, Jeddah, Makkah, Taif, Al Bahah and Dammam.

The startup currently claims to have 1,000 active drivers on its platform (with over half of them being Saudi nationals), delivering over 5,000 shipments a day from 10 dispatch centers. Saee counts leading ecommerce platforms like JollyChic and Dokkan Afkat among its clients, according to the information available on its website.

“The innovative service platform is a key area of focus for Saee, which will enable micro and small ecommerce platforms in the Kingdom to serve their clients better and faster. The new funding will further allow the company to capitalize on its position as a leader in the freelancer-based last-mile delivery industry in the region,” said the startup in a statement to MENAbytes.

Eihab Nassier, the co-founder and CEO of Saee, commenting on the occasion, said, “The new funding will enable the introduction of new services such as 45-minute express delivery and enable the company to expand its reach across the Kingdom’s urban and rural areas.”

“The potential of growth in the Kingdom’s ecommerce sector is tremendous but it is likely to create a huge operational challenge for last-mile delivery companies. Saee’s elastic and scalable model will be able to reliably absorb the challenges ahead,” he added.

Nawaf Al Sahhaf, the CEO of BIAC, said, “Saee is disrupting the last-mile delivery using their light asset model enabling higher efficiency. We at BIAC are always looking to lead the investment rounds to in disruptive homegrown technologies, and we aim to enable entrepreneurs to build and scale their companies, create more jobs in the market and contribute to GDP growth.”

Fetchr, the Dubai-based logistics startup that has been struggling lately had originally started using the same model, depending on freelancers for deliveries, but had later moved to own its own fleet and delivery staff.