A sari-sari shop owner who wears GrowSari
GrowSari, the Manila-based startup that helps small stores grow and digitize, today announced that KKR will lead its Series C round with a $45 million investment. The funds will be used to enter new regions in the Philippines and expand their financial products. The Series C round is still ongoing and the startup says it is already overcrowded, with the final composition being finalized.
Prior to Series C, GrowSari’s total gross was $30 million. Ploonge last wrote about GrowSari in June 2021, when it announced its Series B. It has since expanded the number of municipalities it serves from 100 to 220 and now has a customer base of 100,000 micro, small, and medium-sized businesses ( MSME) store owners.
Founded in 2016, GrowSari is a B2B platform that offers almost every type of service that small and medium-sized retailers, including neighborhood stores that carry daily necessities (called sari-saris), roadside stores and markets and pharmacies. .
For example, it has a wholesale market with products from leading fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands such as Unilever, P&G and Nestlé. It has partnerships with more than 200 providers, such as telecommunications, fintechs and subscription plans, so that sari-saris can offer services such as recharges and bill payments to its customers.
Sari-sari operators can also use GrowSari to launch e-commerce stores and access short-term working capital loans to buy inventory. The startup’s other financial products include digital wallets and cash-in services, and it is looking to add remittances, insurance and loans in partnership with other providers.
The new funding will be used to expand to Visayas and Mindanao, the two other major geographic regions in the Philippines, with the aim of covering all 1.1 million “mom and pop” stores in the Philippines.