Islamabad-based influencer marketing platform Walee has raised $2.7 million in seed funding from Z2C, a Pakistani communications company with interests in advertising, public relations, technology, and commerce. The valuation was not disclosed but Z2C has confirmed to MENAbytes that it has acquired a minority stake in the company.
Founded in 2019 by Muhammad Ahsan Tahir, Walee enables brands and media agencies to connect with influencers for executing online campaigns. According to its website, the startup has a network of over 50,000 influencers (the majority of which are apparently micro-influencers) with a combined reach of 100 million followers.
The website also notes that Walee has registered more than 5,000 brands to date.
With the platform, the brands can engage influencers to promote their products and services to their followers on different social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The startup also has an offering that allows the influencers to sell products of its partner brands and agencies and earn a cut on every successful sale. The creators on the platform can also show interest to participate in a campaign (posted by a brand) and execute the deliverables. The creators can also keep an eye on how much they’ve earned from every campaign on the platform and withdraw the money through different channels when they like.
Walee has also built an a social media listening tool to help brands monitor and analyze conversations on social media platforms. Branchild Communications, a media agency owned by Z2C recently signed a partnership agreement with Walee to distribute the tool to brands in Pakistan.
Muhammad Ahsan Tahir, co-founder and CEO of Walee, commenting on the ocassion, said, “Since 2019, advertisers and agencies have turned to Walee’s ecosystem to advance influencer marketing campaigns and utilize social listening tools. This equity financing from Z2C comes as Walee scales to meet strong regional demand pertaining to influencer search, campaign management and measurement. We offer feature-rich enterprise solutions in the region that offer sentiment and semantic analysis in multiple regional languages including Arabic for social and digital media content and will serve enterprise customers through five offices.”
Fatima Hyder, Group Chief Strategy Officer at Z2C, said, “Walee’s data-driven content analysis and influencer ecosystem approach is a paradigm change for the media and advertising industry. Given our ongoing investments across OTT, eCommerce, and eSports platforms, the inclusion of Walee fits perfectly into our vertically integrated business strategy. We understand, better than most, how challenging it is to build a business from scratch and to scale it amidst the pandemic.”
Walee plans to expand its platform to the Middle East and will be using a part of latest investment for that. The investment will be also used to help startup accelerate its product development.
(The story was updated with some details at 9:50 AM GMT).
