BAN helps facilitate investment into re-commerce company Zingo

Bangladesh Angels Network (BAN), the pioneering angel investment network in Bangladesh, closed a pre-seed investment in Zingo Pvt Ltd, one of the leading e-commerce marketplaces for electronic gadgets. 

The investment was a combination of equity and convertible debt, according to a press release.

After China and India, Bangladesh is the largest second-hand smartphone market in Asia, where 1.4 million working phones are being stored away by consumers waiting for a scope to reliably sell their old phone to earn some money. At the same time, there is a large black market for smuggling stolen phones into the country, and as a consequence, we are losing more than 1000 crore taka in tax annually.

Zingo came up with a solution where consumers can sell their old phone in 1 hour for instant cash with 100% safety in terms of data of devices and physical safety. They are also facilitating a way to buy phones within minutes, drawing mobile phone shop owners who might have sourced phones from black market traders. 

Speaking about the investment, Naim Ahmed, CEO & Founder of Zingo Pvt Ltd said, "Since the investment, we have achieved 1.5x growth by increasing our capacity of selling 1500 units/month to now selling 4000 units/month. And by the end of this year, we are targeting to sell 10,000+ units per month and generate a monthly GMV of 10 crores."

Ahmed Jawad Yusuf, Advisory Lead of Bangladesh Angels Network, adds, "We are delighted to explore the re-commerce sector through this pre-seed investment in Zingo. The entire re-commerce industry is highly fragmented with a relatively low net promoter score within existing business channels - perfect for disruptive startups like Zingo to standardize the industry. Hence, this has been an interesting investment opportunity for BAN to consider and hopefully, we can do more deals in the sector going forward.".

The Zingo team has turned an initial Tk7 lakh investment in 2017 into gross annualized revenues of 2 crores with a monthly compounded growth rate of 20% in 2021. They have traded more than 38,000 phones and are currently doing close to 3.5 thousand smartphone trades per month through C2B networks working with 300+ partners who have a physical shop around Bangladesh.