Eyewa now has 150 eyewear stores in the Mideast, and recently raised $100M to add 100 more.

Helping consumers find great glasses is a booming global business, spawning giants like Warby Parker in the US and Lenskart in India. In the Middle East, this market produces its own growing force: Eyewa.

Eyewa, based in Dubai and Riyadh, sells a wide range of eyewear products, including prescription glasses, sunglasses, blue light glasses, and contact lenses, through a DTC e-commerce and retail platform in five Mideast markets.

Now, the company has raised a Series C round of $100 million. This round, led by global growth investor General Atlantic, brings Eyewa’s total funding to $130 million since its launch in 2017.

Founded by Anass Boumediene, Mehdi Oudghiri, and Abdullah AlRugaib – all former Bain & Company consultants – Eyewa initially entered the eyewear market as an e-commerce seller of third-party brands. However, the company quickly launched its own brands after identifying unmet needs in the Middle East.

Between 2015 and 2017, CEOs Boumediene and Oudghiri led Foodpanda’s regional operations under the ownership of Rocket Internet and DeliveryHero. Their experience growing a food delivery business – which they say has grown 50-fold in three years and turned a profit – inspired them to start their own company.

“After our time with Foodpanda, we were focused on entrepreneurship and knew we wanted to start something of our own,” shared CEO Boumediene in a call with TechCrunch. “We wanted to find the right problem to solve, so we started testing ideas and comparing them to the challenges we saw in different regions.”

From delivering food to selling eyeglasses

The founders put together 87 ideas, and after sorting the options through a list of 15 criteria and conducting a six-month test, they arrived at the eyewear market, an industry very different from food delivery.

They found that the demand for eyewear was increasing, but the supply was not going well. Myopia has been increasing among the young population in the region (some studies show that the prevalence of myopia and high myopia in the UAE is around 27%). In addition, local eyewear companies were focused on store sales, rarely did any e-commerce, and their products were not affordable or suitable for the mass market.

Without previous experience in the eyewear industry, Eyewa started by selling eyewear brands, including Ray-Ban, Gucci, Prada, and Johnson & Johnson, online for two years.

At the time, it had enough data on customer behavior, including cart additions, website searches, and purchase patterns, to design and launch its own in-house brands. Now, Eyewa has nine brands for a variety of tastes, from older customers looking for functional eyewear to younger consumers looking for fashion options. Currently, 96% of Eyewa’s revenue comes from these domestic brands, which, according to the company, has been the key to maintaining prices in the mass market, which includes small cities across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. .

Eyewa markets its eyeglasses, even prescription ones, as fashion accessories, unlike traditional retailers, who often treat customers like patients, selling expensive brands like Prada in sterile environments.

“We’ve changed the way we look at the eyewear experience, where fashion is what customers really care about,” CEO Oudghiri said on the phone. “So that’s what we focus on in sales and health care, we take care of it. We will provide you with the highest quality lenses and complete eye exams, and we will ensure that you have the best health quality of the eyewear you buy. But we want to push you into the fashion retail industry.”

Eyewa also keeps prices low: In the Gulf states, Eyewa eyeglasses, including lenses, are priced around $100, about 50% less than similar products found in traditional stores.

It enhances its omnichannel experience

As an e-commerce platform, Eyewa only serves customers who already have prescriptions and know the glasses they want. But that’s not a very big market. So it started opening retail stores in December 2020 as the Covid closures slowly lifted.

This move has allowed us to reach a wider customer base, as many eyewear shoppers still prefer an in-store experience to try on frames and complete their purchase. This also allowed Eyewa to own the complete customer journey by providing eye exams, which are only possible in physical stores with opticians and exam rooms.

Eyewa raised $21 million Series B from several investors, including Nuwa Capital and Endeavor Catalyst, in 2021 to scale this effort, and since then, it has grown to 150 stores, all fully owned and operated – no franchises. The startup, which now employs 1,300 people, claims to be the largest eyewear brand in Saudi Arabia by store count and the fastest growing retailer of eyewear globally.

To put this growth in perspective: global giants like Warby Parker took seven years to grow from their first store to 100, while India’s Lenskart took almost six years to achieve the same milestone.

“We are growing rapidly globally, but even across the GCC, there is no other retailer in any other way to reach 100 in less than four years. So we acted very quickly,” said Boumediene.

Boumediene declined to disclose how much eyewear the company has sold since its launch but said Eyewa is profitable and growing more than 50% year-on-year in revenue. The company aims to add at least 100 more stores in six countries, including Qatar, its next market, by 2025; will also open a manufacturing facility and a fulfillment center in Riyadh next quarter, the official said.

With this round, General Atlantic joins a growing list of US investors deepening their presence in the GCC by supporting start-ups and establishing local groups, after receiving significant capital from the region’s private wealth funds.

“It seems that there is a new international interest in the region. We have had a development of the VC ecosystem in the last five years, and most of the investments happen early,” Mehdi noted. “But it’s good to see now that strong growth and private equity are starting to look at the region and the likes of General Atlantic coming up, and hopefully more will follow.”

Badwa Capital and Turmeric Capital also participated in the round.