Startup de s-commerce Neta levanta $4,9M en ronda liderada por Kaszek

Neta, a social e-commerce (s-commerce) company based in Mexico City, has announced the closing of a $ 4.5 million seed round led by Kaszek Ventures and with the participation of Founders Fund, Picus Capital, Next Play Ventures, Graph Ventures, Alter Global, among others.

The Stanford-incubated startup was founded last March by Pablo Lagos, with the initial support of Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. Weiner, whom Lagos met in a class during his time at Stanford, wrote Neta’s first check.

Neta’s focus is family-owned retail stores in Mexico, which are all over the country. It is estimated that there is one of these stores for every 20 people. However, they are usually underfunded or have little to no access to technology to modernize their processes.

Neta wants to reach that «other 95%» of consumers who do not have access to the usual e-commerce, either because they do not have access to a reliable interconnection t or because they lack payment systems, such as credit cards or banking accounts.

How does Neta work?

Neta offers a virtual catalog of articles –many of them fresh products– that can be sold through a store. This increases the number of items available in a store. After that, the business owner can market those products to their existing customer base, primarily through WhatsApp.

Physical stores also function as a collection point for deliveries. Instead of delivering to each customer individually, Neta fulfills the orders of 50-100 weekly customers in a single delivery to each store.