Saudi startup Saee raises $2.4 mln in Series A funding

Saee, a Jeddah-based startup providing last-mile delivery through freelancers, received SAR 9 million ($2.4 million) in Series A funding to support local expansion, it said in a statement on Sunday.

The round was led by Saudi-based Business Incubators and Accelerators Company (BIAC), TasHeel Holding and Abunayyan Holding’s investment arm ABN Ventures.

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, said company CEO Eihab Nassier.

While the potential growth in the Kingdom's e-commerce sector is tremendous, it is likely to create a huge operational challenge for last-mile delivery companies.

“Our elastic and scalable model will be able to reliably absorb the challenges ahead,” Nassier added.

Nawaf Al Sahhaf, the CEO of BIAC said the company is always looking to lead investment rounds in disruptive homegrown technologies in order to enable entrepreneurs to build and scale their companies.

Saee, which was incorporated in 2016 in Jeddah, has more than 1,000 active drivers on its platform, and over 50% of them are Saudis. Currently, it delivers more than 5,000 shipments a day from 10 different dispatch centers across the Kingdom.