North Africa: Super app Yassir raises $150m series B funding

Yassir, a multi-sided marketplace offering on-demand services – such as ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, banking and more – announced that it has raised $150 million in series B funding. The investment was led by BOND, with participation from DN Capital, Dorsal Capital, Quiet Capital, Stanford Alumni Ventures (aka Spike Ventures) and Y Combinator, among other strategic investors.

Having raised $193.25 million in the five years since its launch, the company claims to be one of the most valuable start-ups in North Africa. With this latest round of funding, Yassir plans to expand its reach into the region.

“Yassir means ‘easy’ in Arabic, and our mission as a company is to make people’s lives easy,” says Noureddine Tayebi, founder and CEO of Yassir. “In the markets where we operate, we are already having a considerable impact on how people manage their day-to-day lives. We look forward to expanding our presence into other geographies to become the first super app to achieve mass adoption.”

Founded in 2017, today, the company operates in six countries and 45 cities, where it is used by more than eight million users. Popular in the Maghreb region (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) and parts of French-speaking Africa, the super app provides three core services: ride-hailing; food and grocery delivery; and financial services. An all-in-one ecosystem, the app provides its customers with a single-point solution for managing all of their day-to-day activities, from travelling to work to ordering groceries and meals. These services generate revenues for more than 100,000 partners, which include drivers, couriers, merchants, and wholesalers, among other gig workers and vendors.

“We believe technology will foundationally rearchitect consumers’ relationship with daily needs – transportation, food, financial services – not just in developed countries, but in every corner of the world,” says Daegwon Chae, general partner at BOND. “This investment is an extension of that belief in an underserved but dynamic, rapidly growing region. Emerging out of North Africa, the app has already become indispensable to users for critical aspects of their lives.”