Oware, a B2B warehouse and distribution firm based in Pakistan, has received $3.3 million in pre-seed funding.
Silicon Valley investors Flexport Fund and Ratio Ventures are among the round’s backers, as are significant international investors Seedstars International Ventures, The Osiris Group, Swiss Founders Fund, Reflect Ventures, +92 Ventures, Walled City Co, and other strategic angel investors.
Oware, co-founded in June 2021 by Raza Kazmi and Adil Nisar, respectively, Maersk and Careem alumni, empowers businesses to flourish through flexible warehousing and intelligent distribution, providing flexible response to demand variations as well as faster and more inexpensive delivery of goods.
Through its networked fulfilment centres and third-party logistics providers, Oware provides businesses with scalable and tech-driven warehousing and distribution for B2B and retail. Companies can easily launch operations in new places to serve more customers, free of the operationally demanding and sophisticated logistical planning and capital investment that stifles business expansion.
Raza Kazmi, co-founder at Oware, commented,
“There is a huge opportunity in the B2B movement of goods across the region, but it remains immensely underserved. Local businesses remain trapped in an archaic and opaque environment dealing with antiquated supply chain systems that are no longer fit for purpose and remain slow, limited, and capital intensive. The time to set up operations is too long, there is limited visibility or tracking of orders and the execution of processes is inefficient in terms of speed and cost, which we are on a mission to solve.”
Pakistan’s logistics business has a $35 billion+ market opportunity and employs roughly 6% of the country’s workforce. Overspending on warehousing and inventory due to a lack of warehouse flexibility and insight results in expensive and late deliveries with poor visibility into operations. Because of the market’s hyper fragmentation, these inefficiencies occur, resulting in a time-consuming and obsolete process. Furthermore, the fulfilment and distribution business has been under great strain as a result of changing customer expectations and service needs, which Oware wants to address.
