• Saudi Arabia-based re-commence marketplace Soum, has raised $4 million in Seed funding, led by Outliers Venture Capital and Mazen Aljubeir, with participation from Khwarizmi Ventures, Ammar AlKhudairy, and multiple angel investors.
• Founded by Fahad Al Hassan, Fahad Albassam, and Bader Almubarak, Soum is a marketplace where consumers can trade their second-hand possessions, starting with used electronics in Saudi Arabia.
• The new funding has aided the consumer-to-consumer marketplace to emerge from stealth mode.

Press release:

Soum, a Riyadh-based C2C marketplace, has emerged from stealth with $4 million in seed funding led by Outliers Venture Capital and Mazen Aljubeir. The round also included participation from Khwarizmi Ventures, Ammar AlKhudairy, and multiple angel investors with strong entrepreneurial and operational backgrounds.

‍Soum is reimagining recommence in the MENA region and beyond by building the most convenient, trustworthy, and transparent recommence marketplace, starting with consumer electronics in Saudi Arabia.

The global secondhand market is growing rapidly. Secondhand electronics, in particular, is growing at more than 10% annually, driven by an increasing consumer price sensitivity and longer hardware lifespan. Yet despite the global trends, the user experience for buying and selling a secondhand product is broken for MENA users. Users navigate ad-heavy platforms and often carry the burden of building trust and completing the transaction safely. Soum is not only introducing a better user experience; Soum is productizing trust in the transaction and unlocking an opportunity worth more than $40 billion. The startup's growth to date speaks to the unmet customer needs in the region. After only eight months, Soum is already processing millions of dollars of annualized sales.

Fahad Al Hassan, Fahad Albassam, and Bader Almubarak, the three co-founders coming from PwC, BCG, and McK, are building a highly entrepreneurial organisation with a strong focus on experimentation, iteration, and rapid execution across all functions.

“We are tackling a serious customer pain point and offering a solution that is an order-of-magnitude better than any other substitute. Although we have grown exceptionally fast, we are still in the very beginning of capturing a huge market opportunity. The key to unlocking this opportunity is building a highly independent and capable team of doers and problem-solvers pursuing a common goal of building a category-defining company that delights buyers and sellers. I am very proud of our team, and I am thrilled to go through this journey with every Soumer” said Fahad Al Hassan, co-founder and CEO

Outliers' managing partner Mohammed Almeshekah shared, "Today, only 12% of second-hand consumer electronic sales happen digitally today, and more than 80% of digital sales are captured by the incumbent. Soum is unlocking the opportunity both on the supply side as well as the demand side and is led by three outlier founders who are exceptionally positioned to build Soum, bottoms-up, into a multi-country and multi-category successful business. We are thrilled to partner with Bader, Fahad & Fahad."

Soum's investor Mazen Aljubeir commented, "Soum is pursuing a massive opportunity and growing very rapidly. Most importantly, the Soum founders have assembled one of the best teams in the region and built an incredible culture of teamwork, execution, and customer focus. It’s been inspiring to watch their progress and they’re only getting started.”