The company has served more than 100 organizations, growing 150% on a quarterly basis.
Consumers nowadays have adapted e-commerce as part of their shopping routine, as evidenced by more than 70% of Saudis shopping online, according to a recent report by CITC. This is mainly due to the affordability, convenience, and speed of e-commerce platforms. However, the B2B side of e-commerce has largely lagged behind the accelerated advancements in e-commerce. As a result of the lack of adoption of e-commerce within organizations, many of their processes remain decades-old, manual, and simply inefficient, and operational procurement is no different. We are glad to announce our first investment in Lawazem, a B2B operational procurement e-commerce platform that focuses on the operational needs of medium and large organizations providing a seamless digital solution with various purchase options developed explicitly for procurement departments starting from regular e-commerce purchases up to full-frame agreements.
Lawazem was founded in 2020 in Riyadh by Abdulhakim AlBishr and Nasser AlShaya. The company’s leadership team has more than 20 years of combined experience spanning sales, procurement, product management, and information systems. Leveraging their expertise, the company has been able to onboard more than +100 organizations, public and private, across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Lawazem focuses on operational procurement, a short-term, transactional activity that usually is comprised of routine purchases of materials, supplies, and services that are essential to the day-to-day functions of an organization, such as plastics, cleaning supplies, stationery, facility operations, maintenance, furniture, etc. Research suggests that operational procurement accounts for 75% of total procurement transactions, exceeding $100 Bn in market size globally. Locally, the market is estimated to be around $1B in size, and it is almost entirely done manually with little digitization and technology to facilitate market operations. Lawazem’s founders are capitalizing on the lack of seamless technology solutions and are adamant to make Lawazem the leading technology-enabled platform for all B2B operational needs.
Our investment in Lawazem follows our thesis of investing in early-stage technology companies: invest in great teams that are tackling massive problems. Abdulhakim and Nasser, having had more than 20+ years in the procurement industry, are focused on providing organizations with high-quality goods and services while simplifying the process to its bare essentials. We are happy to invest in Lawazem and add it to our growing list of portfolio companies.
