Pakistan-based content marketing platform Walee raises $2.7M Seed round
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The Pakistan-based content marketing platform Walee has just announced its recent funding round closed at $2.7M. The Seed funding round was led by Pakistan-based communications company Z2C.
Founded in 2019, Walee set forth to disrupt the global multi-billion-dollar digital advertising industry by helping brands connect with influencers that can reach their target audience, optimize their return on investments, and most importantly create organic conversations around and engagement with the brand. On the other end, Walee empowers influencers and helps them further leverage their social media following for new lucrative opportunities.
Based on our H1 2021 Pakistan Venture Investment Report, the Pakistani venture space observed a shift towards later-stage deals. Where only 63% of transactions in Pakistan in H1’21 were sized at $3M and below, as compared to 92% in FY’20. This recent investment proves that there’s still investor appetite for early-stage startups, albeit at a slower pace than previous years like 2017, where transactions below $500K accounted for 75% of total funds raised.
Since its launch, Walee grew its following and influencer network, aggregating an impressive network of 50,000 micro to A-list influencers, serving more than 5,000 brands subscribed to the platform. In light of this recent investment, Walee Co-founder and CEO Muhammad Ahsan Tahir highlighted “Since 2019, advertisers and agencies have turned to Walee’s ecosystem to advance influencer marketing campaigns and utilize social listening tools. This equity financing from Z2C comes as Walee scales to meet strong regional demand pertaining to influencer search, campaign management and measurement. We offer feature-rich enterprise solutions in the region that offer sentiment and semantic analysis in multiple regional languages including Arabic for social and digital media content and will serve enterprise customers through five offices.”
Complementing its platform services to give a fully integrated experience, the Pakistan-based startup also provides enterprise solutions that help brands monitor, manage, and optimize their online campaigns on the platform. Aside from the capital aspect, this strategic investment also expands Walee’s enterprise market as Z2C subsidiary Branchild Communications aims to distribute Walee’s listening tools amongst other solutions.
Fatima Hyder, Group Chief Strategy Officer at Z2C concluded “Walee’s data-driven content analysis and influencer ecosystem approach is a paradigm change for the media and advertising industry. Given our ongoing investments across OTT, E-Commerce, and eSports platforms, the inclusion of Walee fits perfectly into our vertically integrated business strategy. We understand, better than most, how challenging it is to build a business from scratch and to scale it amidst the pandemic.”
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