Riyadh tech start-up Foodics launches $100m fund to aid SMEs

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Foodics, a Riyadh-based technology start-up servicing the retail and food and beverage industries, rolled out a good $100 million microloan fund on Tuesday to aid small and medium-sized enterprises.

A fresh lending arm, Foodics Capital, will support the kingdom’s F&B merchants in the post-Covid-19 era through Sharia-compliant microloans, it said in a statement.

It'll extend loans of between $5,000 and $133,000, depending on certain requirements of its customers.

“With cash flow being a critical pain level for small enterprises right now, we wished to manage to offer them a one-stop-shop that also covers their finance needs and allows them to accelerate their growth charge,” Ahmad Al-Zaini, co-founder and chief executive of the company, said.

“A finance supplying was always component of our vision … Foodics is quite proud to now allow merchants to finance their performing capital by giving them usage of loans,” he added.

Foodics Capital has joined forces with Saudi Arabia-based Maalem Finance, a good provider of Sharia-compliant consumer and SME funding.

The first phase of the fund, which has been approved by the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, will be offered to existing Foodics customers, who are pre-qualified for loans, the statement said. It'll be rolled out across the kingdom by the end of this year.

The fund will allow for "faster and more flexible financing than almost all of the facilities in your community”, according to Abdullah Tahboub, chief financial officer of Foodics.

Interested SMEs can certainly apply online. The original approval should come within a day, while last consent will become granted within a week, Mr Tahboub said.

Founded in 2014, Foodics offers a restaurant managing platform that facilitates owners to perform their business better. It has serviced a lot more than 5,000 customers and prepared over one billion orders through its program, through which about $200m of transactions measured by gross products value are produced each month.

The business has offices in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, and happens to be along the way of closing a string B funding round.

It raised $4m found in pre-Series B funding from Riyad Taqnia Fund, Tech Invest Com, Naseel Positioning and Kuwait-based Faith Capital this past year. In addition, it raised $4m within an earlier Series A funding round in 2017.

Foodics is currently available in English, Arabic and French and the business is planning to push out a Spanish version of it has the software in the approaching months. 
Source: https://www.thenationalnews.com

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