Pakistan's PostEx to enter new markets, starting with Saudi Arabia
Pakistani startup PostEx is entering Saudi Arabia as first global market after hitting $21 million ARR in the South Asian nation.
Pakistani startup PostEx, offering financial and logistics services to online merchants, is set to enter new markets, beginning with Saudi Arabia this year, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
“We want to go into other markets to really disrupt them because we see the gap,” said Muhammad Omer Khan, founder and CEO of PostEx, in an interview.
E-commerce in Pakistan, which currently sits at around 1.5% of its total retail market, has grown 50% in the last 12 months. PostEx is a likely contributor to that growth.
Online merchants in Pakistan find it challenging to sustain their business and achieve growth, as 95% of transactions are paid with cash on delivery. Courier companies in the South Asian nation take 10 to 15 days to settle those transactions from the dispatch time to delivery. All this leads to working capital issues for online merchants.
In 2020, Khan founded PostEx to solve these issues by giving merchants upfront payments against cash-on-delivery orders, and an attached logistics service. After getting regulated as a non-bank financial institution in Pakistan, the startup also launched a growth capital offering for online merchants. However, to reduce risks, the startup does not provide pure financial support to merchants, and only gives them credit if they use its logistics service.
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