Egyptian YFS receives $7M to Scale its Logistics and Delivery Business
Egyptian on-demand delivery startup building a network of dark stores and micro-warehouses across Egypt, Yalla Fel Sekka (YFS), has secured a $7 million Series A round.
DisruptAD led the Series A round while ADQ’s venture platform, and Kuwait-based Kharafi Group, funded the startup again in this round.
Launched in 2020 by Khashayar Mahdavi and Yasmine Abdel Karim, YFS is a B2B2C delivery logistics venture in which the firm interacts with a customer’s backend, such as a supermarket, so that anytime a user places an online purchase, the firm picks them up from a dark store designed to keep its customers’ merchandise and delivers it to them.
The founders believe that in identifying a critical gap in the regional market: the need for near-instant deliveries, YFS has assembled a distributed network of small mini-warehouses and dark stores, where businesses can store the goods very close to their customers to ensure quick deliveries.
Khashayar Mahdavi, co-founder of YFS spoke on the ability of the startup to service the economy at the micro-level and increase productivity.
“Being able to marry operational excellence and innovation with the technology to bring down your cost and have productivity gains is what sets us apart.
“And because of our economic and finance background, we’ve always been super focused on unit economics. So that’s what we’ve tried to achieve here, bringing innovation into this space with a focus on productivity and unit economics, and having this distributed logistics services to be able to serve our customers extremely quickly,” said Mahdavi.
She also said YFS has completed two million deliveries across five cities in Egypt — Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, Mansoura, and Tanta — all the while being gross margin positive, all in 18 months.
“We are working on also serving multiple different businesses and even SMEs. We have a very advanced technology that will easily integrate with anyone. And that’s also a key advantage for us because we can help SMEs come online and help with their logistics arm while they focus on the product,” Mahdavi added.
The founder concluded that YFS will be deploying the new funding to expand its presence in cities across Egypt and the MENA region. Abdel Karim said the company would also expand on its dark store management as it looks to build 20 to 40 dark stores in the coming year.
“What’s important to say is anything that has to do with quick commerce or instant delivery requires a new form of infrastructure on the ground to be close to your customers, technology, operations,” he said. “All of that is radically different from the type of infrastructure we saw when we were not dealing with quick commerce. But now this is what it is all about for YFS, to become the main player and the leader of offering these logistic services for commerce.”