Pakistani eCommerce startup LAAM Technologies, which specializes in South Asian apparel raises $5.5 million in an all-equity seed investment round.
Investors & Plans:
With participation from Graph Ventures, Mentors Fund, and technology leaders from Oracle, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce, the round was headed by Disrupt Ventures and Zayn VC. The money will help LAAM improve its technological platform and enter new markets.
Today, LAAM provides a carefully chosen catalog of more than 100,000 items, including accessories, footwear, and clothing for men, women, and children that includes formal, ethnic, and casual styles. With major markets in the US, Canada, the UK, and the Middle East, the platform links around 1,200 suppliers, mostly from Pakistan, with a client base that spans 100 nations.
What’s LAAM:
Arif Iqbal and three other co-founders founded LAAM in 2021 to bridge the gap between South Asian fashion and its international diaspora. Iqbal’s vision for the platform has been shaped by his vast experience working for tech behemoths like eBay, Microsoft, Pinterest, and Meta. Iqbal observed that South Asian expats frequently depended on friends and relatives to give them cultural clothing because there was little local supply when they were in North America. This insight, along with the unrealized fashion industry potential in Pakistan, motivated him to go back home and start LAAM.
Accelerating Designers and Scaling Fashion:
Pakistan’s fragmented fashion business benefits greatly from LAAM, which helps it expand more quickly and attract new clients. In addition to tools to assist sellers with commercial chores like demand forecasting and inventory management, LAAM offers essential infrastructure for sellers, such as logistics, fulfillment, and customs assistance.
By empowering designers and craftspeople and sustaining the livelihoods of over 10,000 families, LAAM promotes creativity. LAAM presently sells over 100,000 goods to customers worldwide, and each new designer who joins the platform increases LAAM’s inventory.
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Since its inception, LAAM’s revenues have doubled yearly, demonstrating its impressive growth. The platform’s sellers have sold about $100 million worth of goods to more than 500,000 buyers across 100 nations. In addition to helping vendors create their direct-to-consumer websites, LAAM keeps a portion of every sale.
Empowering Growth:
Iqbal is optimistic that LAAM will be able further to accelerate its expansion through its initial financing efforts. The money will go toward improving the platform’s core technology, such as creating features that use artificial intelligence to help merchants. To enhance the general customer experience in these crucial areas, the company also intends to forge a larger local presence in its largest markets, including the US and the Middle East.
In addition, LAAM is committed to pursuing a more aggressive go-to-market strategy and onboarding more sellers from South Asia, including Pakistan. The company’s clever use of social networking platforms and SEO techniques, which capitalizes on Iqbal’s own experience in the tech sector, has been largely responsible for its success thus far. Iqbal adds that LAAM can benefit from the close-knit character of South Asian communities because successful sales to a small number of people frequently spark considerably more interest from the community at large.
Investors Thoughts:
The business and the market’s potential scale have piqued the curiosity of investors.
Faisal Aftab, managing partner at Zayn VC, praises LAAM & stated: “Capacity to empower local craftspeople and bring South Asian fashion to a worldwide audience, we think LAAM has a special chance to change the way the world views and accesses South Asian fashion.”
Disrupt Ventures managing partner Aaqib Gadit emphasized: “LAAM creatively solves operational and logistical challenges, showcasing its remarkable ability to transform the way this market operates.”
