Tunisia-based peer-to-peer fashion marketplace Dabchy has raised $300k in a seed round led by 500 Startups. Other investors to have chipped in with significant contributions include Flat6Labs, Vision Ventures, and Daal, as well as a group of angel investors.
Dabchy, co-founded by the trio of Ghazi Ketata, Oussama Mahjoub, and Ameni Mansouri, has a rather interesting origin story. Unlike most startups, it began its journey as a Facebook Group which increasingly grew in popularity.
Eventually, the group gathered enough members to inspire the co-founders to go along with the plan to go bigger and more structured by evolving into a startup. The Facebook Group remains active even today and has more than 400,000 users in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.
Dabchy offers dedicated mobile and web-based platforms to enable users to sell the unused apparel and accessories in their wardrobe to other members. The items trading on the platform include both pre-owned and new, self-made clothes and accessories,
The company claims that its mobile app alone has been downloaded more than 100,000 times — and that’s not counting the sheer high number of web users on the platform.
“At Dabchy, we operate as a trusted third between buyers and sellers and have facilitated more than 100,000 transactions to-date. Our ambition is to become the number one fashion marketplace in the region and to empower a new generation of women to become microentrepreneurs by creating their own businesses online,” Ameni Mansouri, Co-Founder, and CEO at Dabchy, said in a conversation with MENAbytes shortly after announcing the success of the company’s seed round.
As a startup, Dabchy first came into the spotlight by graduating from the first cohort of Flat6Labs Tunis. The company is currently participating in the second cohort of Womentum, the famed accelerator program dedicated to female startup founders in the region.
