converted toan Egyptian startup operating a marketing operating system for e-commerce brands has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Saudi Arabia-based Merak Capital.
Other participating investors are 500 Global and MSAS. The company said in a statement that it plans to use the funds for strategic solicitation and further development of its platform.
When brands switch to ecommerce sales, they are working with massive amounts of fragmented data that must be aggregated to drive informed decisions and growth. As such, platforms like Convertedin are becoming essential as it caters to brands and businesses with one, some, or all of these objectives: to drive personalized and scalable campaigns, convert customers, deliver measurable results, and increase revenue.
Director Mohamed Fergany founded the company with Mohamed Atef and Mustafa Raslan in 2019 after working with different brands in companies such as Speakol Ads and Vodafone. His time as an employee opened his eyes to the opportunity to help offline stores retarget and retain their customers online, while finding new customers to shop in their stores offline.
“If you work at IKEA and they take your phone number. After that, our engine works to find a similar product for you to buy and retargets you online. If you go back to IKEA for that product, we can calculate the cost of online conversion,” the CEO said in the interview. “This was the main idea right now, because we saw a huge problem where there was no analytics platform for the offline store or a retargeting mechanism.”
When the pandemic hit and offline stores had to close their doors, many of these brands turned to e-commerce and as a result, Convertedin went online as well.
Fergany argues that while online brands use CRM software to collect data, they don’t use most of it. Convertedin therefore offers a solution where they can best use their data. It connects to more than 10 major ecommerce platforms and ad networks – and brands, once connected, can place customers in different segments such as high and low value and categories such as people looking for specific products and use these insights to create personalized multi-channel marketing and drive various campaigns across social media, SMS, email, search and other channels while having the ability to track and attribute revenue conversion.
Convertedin says SMB ecommerce marketers using the platform increase their return on ad spend (ROAS) by 2x and reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) by 40%. To date, the company has partnered with media buying and advertising agencies, working with more than 100 local and multinational brands in Africa, the Middle East and South America in the automotive, healthcare and technology industries. Convertedin’s revenues from these companies have grown “double digits” month-over-month, Fergany said.
The three-year-old company headquartered in Egypt also has offices in Saudi Arabia and Brazil; it recently opened one in the latter. The South American market is huge, with e-commerce revenue from over 200 million users reaching $160 billion by 2025. As a result, Convertedin plans to make its services available in Portuguese in addition to English and Arabic for brands in Brazil and also Mexico, another South American market. Fergany also said Convertedin is also looking at South Africa and India.
“We are targeting emerging markets and if you look at it from a healthy unitary economy, we can easily sell in those countries because there is little competition there,” said the CEO of the expansion into five new markets, including Saudi Arabia. “And the cost of acquiring customers is low compared to the US or European markets.” The new investment will help Convertedin with this expansion in addition to R&D and hiring.
In a statement, Ahmed Aljibreen, a partner at lead investor Merak Capital, said of his firm’s investment that the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing platforms is adding a new layer of challenges for e-commerce businesses – and Convertedin is solving that. Hence the reason why Merak Capital supported the company. “We are excited to support Convertedin, a martech company that has built a state-of-the-art platform to simplify digital marketing, improve customer acquisition and drive growth for its customers. Convertedin is led by a world-class team that we are extremely confident in as the company enters its next phase of growth in MENA and Latin America.”
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