Algeria-based logistics and last-mile delivery super app Yassir has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike Ventures, and Quiet Capital, Wamda reports. Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, VentureSouq, Nellore Capital, Moving Capital (the Uber alumni investment club) were in participation along with notable angel investors including Cleo Sham, former director of operations at Uber in Europe and China, Thomas Layton, chairman of Upwork and founder of Opentable and Metaweb, Rohan Monga, former COO of Gojek and Hannes Graah, former VP of Spotify and Revolut.

Amel Delli, El Mahdi Yettou, Mustapha Baha, Noureddine Tayebi founded Yassir in 2016. The startup offers ride-hailing and parcel delivery and on-demand delivery services covering multiple verticals such as grocery, food, appliances, and cosmetics among others. Over the past couple of years, Yassir has been heavily focusing on its delivery segment; especially after its ride-hailing business was severely impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. At the onset of the crisis, Yassir extended its delivery services to 16 cities across its three key markets; Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia within the span of a month.

Yassir currently caters to three million users across its existing markets, with plans to expand to sub-Saharan markets at the beginning of next year. The ultimate goal for the Yassir platform is to offer payment services to all sides of the marketplace, in a region where a large majority of people and merchants remain unbanked and/or seldomly use payment services.

“When we first started, on-demand services that we all know about, like ride-hailing, last-mile delivery, home services, were pretty much virgin in those countries, and some of the countries that we want to target, when it comes to such services, they remain [untapped],” said Taybi.

Besides expansion, Yassir is also planning to hire more local tech talent. “We’re 100 percent a local champion, and what I mean by that is that the whole team is from the region, including the tech team, it was actually part of our mission. We want to empower the local talent and most of the technical talents,” he added.