:quality(75)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/bloomberglinea/2MTR6R65ZBFDLLOUQW56Y6APKA.jpeg "Neta takes small neighborhood stores and expands their SKU's by offering them a virtual catalog they can also sell from.")
Miami — Neta, a social e-commerce platform founded in Mexico City, today announced the close of a $4.9 million Seed round led by Kaszek Capital with participation from Founders Fund, Picus Capital, Next Play Ventures, Graph Ventures, Alter Global, among others.
Neta is an online-to-offline e-commerce platform that uses mom and pop stores to aggregate demand and delivery, allowing locals to place orders through a shop owner and then pick up their groceries in that same shop, too. The company aims to reach the “other 95%” of consumers who don’t have access to regular e-commerce, in part because they may not have fast internet, a credit card or a bank account.
“I was able to see that all these e-commerce platforms were targeting the top of the pyramid,” said Pablo Lagos Allegre, Neta’s founder and CEO.
Neta offers a virtual catalog of items - many of which are fresh produce - that can be sold through a shop, therefore increasing the number of items available in a local store, and then relies on the shop owner to market those products to her existing client base mostly via WhatsApp. For every Neta item a shop owner sells, she earns a commission.
“The catalog is a simple web app, very light, and payments are made in advance in cash,” Lagos added.
The company was incubated at Stanford University while Lagos was completing his MBA. He launched Neta in June of 2021 and said the company already has 10,000 clients. While shop owners’ clients eventually become Neta clients, the company continues to pay a commission to the shop owner.
The company says their revenue is growing 20% WoW (week over week) since founding and they have 30 employees.
“There are 6 million of these stores in Mexico,” Lagos said of the market size. While the company plans to use the money from this round to expand in Mexico City and to other cities in the country, Lagos said he has plans to grow throughout LatAm, as well.
The Backstory
Lagos started his career in social enterprise by working with an indigenous community in Chiapas, in south eastern Mexico. He later worked in Kenya, outside of Nairobi, at an early-stage social enterprise and that’s where he started noticing some of these online to offline business models and realized they could apply well to communities in LatAm.
In between his time in Chiapas and Kenya, he worked at Boston Consulting Group in Mexico City, which gave him a strong business and strategy background. But it wasn’t until his MBA internship at Frubana, a farm-to-table fruit and vegetable platform backed by Y Combinator that he really put his two sets of experiences together.
It was at Stanford that Lagos met Jeff Weiner, Chairman of LinkedIn and founder of Next Play Ventures. Weiner cut him his first check for Neta. “Pablo’s values, sense of purpose, and ability to inspire were evident from the first time I heard him speak. We are excited to be working with him and the world-class team at Neta to help families throughout Latin America gain digital access to lower cost goods and services,” said Weiner.
