MOROCCO – Chari.ma, a fintech and e-commerce startup, has announced the acquisition of the mobile credit book application Karny.ma.
Karny.ma. latter is a telephone credit book allowing traditional local businesses to manage their outstanding customers. Available on Google Play, the application allows them to simply record their transactions on their phone, share them with their debtors and thus more easily collect their loans.
Karny.ma, founded by consultants from the Boston Consulting Group, already has 15,000 customer grocery stores across Morocco.
“The users of Karny.ma are right in the target of those of Chari. We believe that there can be a lot of synergies between the two applications and we want to grow both in parallel with the end goal of starting to offer financial services to all of our customers,” said Ismael Belkhayat, co-founder and CEO of Chari.
“To do this, we hope to obtain a payment institution authorization quickly.”
Chari.ma thus hopes to use Karny.ma to acquire new users at a lower price. Indeed, the customer acquisition cost is lower on Karny than on Chari. It is therefore enough for the group to attract new users to Karny.ma and then convert them into Chari.ma users.
“We believe that there can be a lot of synergies between the two applications and we want to grow both in parallel.”
This acquisition follows its financing by Plug and Play, Silicone Valley’s most active Venture Capitalist, by Orange Digital Ventures, the venture capital arm of the French telecom operator, and by the Y Combinator.
As a reminder, Chari is a B2B e-commerce application allowing traditional convenience stores to stock up on all the products resold in their store with the promise of having them delivered in less than 24 hours.
Chari was incubated within the family holding HnS Invest Holding before joining the ranks of STATION F Paris and seducing more than ten thousand grocery stores in Morocco.
Launched in January 2020 by the duo Ismael Belkhayat and Sophia Alj, Chari is experiencing monthly growth of more than 10% and plans to end the year 2021 with a turnover of more than 200 million DH.
At the end of 2020, Chari received the African startup of the year award from the French telecom operator Orange, in a competition in which more than 500 startups participated.
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