عربي

Talabat cofounders acquire Q8flowers.com for $3M

Arabic

Talabat cofounders acquire Q8flowers.com for $3M

Cofounders of Talabat.com has accquired florist delivery site Q8flowers.com for one million Kuwaiti dinar (US$3 million).

The deal, announced yesterday, included other undisclosed investors.

Founded in 2005 the site was the first of its kind in Kuwait and has since gone on since to gain users around the world.

The site’s founder and owner, Khaled Rashid AlBadr, told Kuwait’s AlQabas news site that since 2005, they have gained customers in America, Canada and Europe.

A spokesman for Talabat.com cofounder Khaled AlOtaibi told Wamda that in pursuit of a new acquisition in the Kuwait market, he and fellow angel investors, liked the consumer space and were reviewing a few verticals within it, one of which was the flowers vertical.

As very early adopters of consuming flowers online and in looking for something already in existence they came across Q8flowers.com.  “If you look at the region, the [online flower] community is fragmented, and if you zoom in on Kuwait it’s even more so,” AlOtaibi said.

The undisclosed investors, are, according to AlOtaibi’s office, a pool of angel investors who now can add Q8flowers.com as the seventh addition to their portfolio. “Like the PayPal mafia, we’re the Talabat Mafia,” one of the investors told Wamda.

According to a spokesman for AlOtaibi the user growth of the site has been growing at 100 percent year on year, “and this was with minimal traditional [marketing] efforts,” they said.

Going forward the new owners have a 12 month plan that involves, revamping the IP infrastructures of the site, expanding into other geographies and expanding into similar services within the same vertical of online and flowers.

Talking to AlQabas the Q8flowers.com founder said: "If the website had the opportunity to expand beyond Kuwait, I am fully aware we could sell it  for a higher price."

While AlBadr will no longer be involved in the day-to-day running of the company he maintains a 10 percent equity position.

Indeed, AlOtaibi’s own cofounded startup Talabat.com went on to great success, albeit without him, when it was sold for $170 million to Rocket Internet in February 2015.

 

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