Cairo-based furniture e-commerce marketplace Homzmart has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by MSA Capital and Nuwa Capital, it announced in a statement today. The round also included the participation of Rise Capital, Impact46, EQ2 Ventures, and Outliers Ventures. It had previously raised $1.3 million in a seed round in February 2020.

Homzmart was founded in late 2019 by Daraz’s former COO Mahmoud Ibrahim and Ibrahim Mohammed who led Jumia’s logistics development in Egypt to make furniture discovery and shopping easier for customers in Egypt. Its platform currently features 55,000 products from thousands of brands and merchants and has grown over 30x (in terms of sales) in the last twelve months, a statement by the startup noted, adding that it now incorporates artificial intelligence and other tools to optimize the content of sellers and help shoppers with their purchasing decisions.

The Egyptian startup helps customers by providing them with a large variety of furniture options and sellers to choose from and for sellers, Homzmart makes it easy to expand their customer base by using its technology and marketplace.

Commenting on the occasion, Homzmart’s co-founder and CEO Mahmoud Ibrahim, said, “We have seized the opportunity to digitize shopping for furniture and home goods. The market opportunity in the region is huge, and our business model is perfectly set up for it. Homzmart provides an easy one-stop-shop platform to transform the experience for furniture sellers and consumers, and we are very excited about our next stage of growth.”

“We are delighted to complete this funding round. It will accelerate our progress to expand regionally and execute our strategy of consolidating the whole value chain. I would like to thank all our investors for their support,” added the former Rocket Internet executive who had helped expand Daraz across multiple markets in South Asia.

Ben Harburg, the General Partner of MSA Capital, said, “The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the extreme vulnerabilities and inefficiencies of the Middle East’s archaic offline retail ecosystem, logistics, and supply chain. Into the void stepped Homzmart as the next generation, digitally-enabled online marketplace, and optimized logistics provider for large item retail addressing both consumer and enterprise customers.”

“Mahmoud and his team’s executional excellence, born out of deep experience managing ecommerce and fulfillment in challenging conditions with Jumia and Daraz, and guided by Chinese best practices from Alibaba, has resulted in a firm that has rapidly become the dominant online marketplace, fulfillment, and finance facilitator for all merchants and brands in the region,” he added.

Sarah Abu Risheh, Partner at Nuwa Capital, said, “Homzmart had already carved a solid trajectory for itself early into the pandemic, in an industry that needed an uplift. The way Mahmoud, Ibrahim and their team managed to exponentially and continuously grow the business during a global economic slowdown further demonstrates that it is a truly exceptional company.”