• Saudi Arabia-based SaaS startup OTO has raised a $3 million Seed round from MEVP & Derayah Capital.
• Founded in 2019 by Mohammad Al-Razaz and Furkan Uzar, OTO helps e-commerce brands ship, manage, track, and return their online orders with 100+ shipping carriers via one single dashboard.
• OTO, which now operates in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Egypt, claims to have grown by 300 per cent year to date in the number of processed orders compared to 2020, with clients including Zain, SACO, Arabian Oud, Zohoor Alreef, The Body Shop, Cardial and others.

Press release:

Riyadh-based Shipping management software and delivery platform OTO has successfully raised $3 million in its latest funding round. The Seed round was led by Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP) and Derayah Capital.

Founded in 2019, by CEO Mohammad Al-Razaz and CTO Furkan Uzar, OTO has built world-class technology to help e-commerce brands ship, manage, track, and return their online orders with 100+ shipping carriers via a consolidated dashboard. On a mission of building global shipping technology that could be used by any company of any size anywhere in the e-commerce space, OTO has grown by 300% year to date in the number of processed orders compared to 2020 and is expected to grow by 500% by the end of 2021. Currently, they have more than 400 registered brands shipping their online orders locally and internationally, including well-known brands like Zain, SACO, The Body Shop, and many others.

Through its hybrid integration, OTO is positioned nicely between the booming e-commerce and Transport & Logistics (T&L) sectors. Observing a 32 per cent and 122 per cent YoY growth in funding in 2021, e-commerce and T&L rank the 4th and 5th most funded industries this year respectively.

The Saudi-based startup helps businesses save time and money by providing a multi-carrier infrastructure and automating processes like shipping rates comparison, label generation, tracking, returns, and reporting. Retailers, e-commerce brands, and logistics players connect to OTO and access a carrier network all through one API and dashboard. Co-founder and CEO Mohammad Al-Razaz highlighted the paint point behind these solutions “Moving towards e-commerce is not as easy as it sounds, since most of the online businesses are struggling from the manual operational processes in shipping, starting from using multiple carriers’ dashboards to downloading excel sheets to analyse the performance of the shipping carriers. On the other hand, 57% of GCC consumers expect their online orders to be delivered within 2 - 24 hours. Indeed, 7 out of 10 of the online orders abandon their shopping cart mainly from the high shipping fees and late delivery times. We are here to solve this problem.”

In just 18 months, OTO has built integrations with over 100 carriers and 15 sales channels, making them the largest integrator for shipping services in the MENA region. “If Pizza can be ordered, prepared, backed, packed, and delivered to your door in less than 45 mins, then why does your online ordered shirt take 4 - 5 days to be delivered?” asked Al-Razaz. “Our technology enables Ecommerce Stores, OmniChannel Retailers, Marketplaces and Fulfillment Centers to enjoy an Amazon-like experience by automating the operational processes, improving the delivery times, and getting access to discounted shipping fees. In less than 5 minutes, our customers can connect their e-commerce platform to their physical store/warehouses to a pool of shipping carriers.”

In addition, the solution integrates with the leading ERP systems & WMS solutions to sync and monitor the inventory levels of the products at the physical stores and warehouses. OTO’s advanced shipping engine helps you select the best shipping option based on configurable feasibility and priority rules to make sure you’re shipping with the best carrier either by using your own shipping rates, or OTO’s discounted shipping rates. “Saudi Arabia has always played a key role in logistics, being located amidst three continents on the trade routes linking Asia and Europe. Therefore, we leveraged the expertise of our team to build advanced solutions that will overcome the local & global e-commerce fulfilment challenges” said Al-Razaz.

The Riyadh-based team plans to utilise its newly acquired funds to further evolve its Tech stack & platform offering, grow its workforce to reach 50 team members in 12 months, and expand its market footfall across the GCC & Egypt. In light of this launch investment, MEVP partner, Riyad Abou Jaoudeh, concluded “With e-commerce in MENA growing 20 per cnet+ year on year and rising expectations of digitally-native shoppers, many omnichannel and e-commerce retailers are unable to fulfil their orders efficiently to meet those expectations. Happy customers have helped us identify OTO as a key e-commerce enabler that automates order fulfilment to reduce delivery time and costs. We are excited to join Mohamad, Furkan and the OTO heroes as they build a scalable and localised SaaS platform. We are happy to partner with Derayah Capital to support OTO in strategic, long-term investment in their product and technology.”