Gmail & Y Combinator Founders Make ‘Sweet Tooth’ Investment In Egyptian Baked Goods/Grocery Startup, Breadfast
An Egyptian delivery platform for bread and grocery which is backed by Y Combinator and is known by the name, Breadfast, has raised a bridge round (pre-Series B).
As gathered by MENAbytes, the exact size of the deal remains undisclosed but the value of the investment is around seven figures (USD).
Additional information obtained on the funding round suggests that Breadfast raised its latest investment from Y Combinator’s founder Paul Graham and Gmail’s founder Paul Buchheit, Endure Capital.
Other participants in the bridge round are Abu Dhabi-based Shorooq Partners, San Francisco-based Pioneer Fund, NHN Ventures, and ‘very strategic players’ from Saudi, UAE, United States, United Kingdom, and Tanzania.
Breadfast, a Cairo-based food-tech startup and a fresh YC alumnus, raised a seven-figure Series A only some nine months before. The latest bridge round is expected to facilitate, in part, the startup’s expansion plans into other parts of North Africa and the Middle East.
Breadfast was founded in 2017 by Mostafa Amin, kicking off with next-day delivery of its own fresh bread and bakery products to customers in Cairo, before extending its offerings to include the delivery of groceries.
Breadfast claims to be delivering tens of thousands of orders every month. After making a splash in Egypt, Breadfast is now gunning for aggressive expansion within the next three years across the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey, starting with Dubai, Riyadh, and Jeddah. Amin said Breadfast will likely launch in Dubai by the end of this year.
“Breadfast is on a mission to drive the emerging markets to a world-class shopping experience. Our customers have been and will always be our top priority,” said the Breadfast co-founder and CEO.
“We think that customer experience is underestimated in emerging markets, and our goal is to build the right infrastructure using technology to reach the experience the customer deserves.”
The funding announcement coincided with the quiet launch of Breadfast Now; a native cloud supermarket which the startup claims is the first of its kind in the Middle East and Africa.
As the founder claims, Breadfast Now will deliver freshly-baked goods produced daily in Breadfast’s production facilities in addition to breakfast delights and general groceries (including fruits) across Cairo in no more than 1 hour.
Amin also revealed to MENAbytes that most of the SKUs are by Breadfast and the rest are aggregated in their warehouses to be dispatched from there to customers on a daily basis.
“We are dealing directly with the manufacturers and farmers to source these products,” he said.
In a statement, Shane Shin, Founding Partner at Shorooq Partners, said, “We are excited and humbled to join Breadfast’s journey as we firmly believe in the Founders and their unparalleled focus on execution, user experience, and scale. We have been working closely with Breadfast to build their operations in UAE, KSA and so forth and cannot wait to dominate the region.”
