Helping consumers find the perfect eyewear is a fast-growing global business, giving rise to giants such as Warby Parker in the US and Lenskart in India. In the Middle East, this market produces emerging powerhouse Eyewa.
Headquartered in Dubai and Riyadh, Eyewa sells a range of eyewear products, including prescription glasses, sunglasses, blue light glasses and contact lenses, in five Middle East markets through its DTC e-commerce and retail platform.
Now the company has raised $100 million in a Series C round. The round, led by global growth investor General Atlantic, brings Eyewa’s total funding to $130 million since launching in 2017.
Founded by former Bain & Company consultants Anass Boumediene, Mehdi Oudghiri and Abdullah AlRugaib, Eyewa initially entered the eyewear market as an e-commerce retailer for third-party brands. However, the company soon launched its own brand after identifying an unmet need in the Middle East.
From 2015 to 2017, co-CEOs Boumediene and Oudghiri led Foodpanda’s regional operations under Rocket Internet and DeliveryHero ownership. Their experience scaling a food delivery business, which they claim grew 50x in three years and achieved profitability, motivated them to start their own company.
“After working at Foodpanda, we fell in love with entrepreneurship and knew we wanted to start something of our own,” co-CEO Boumediene told TechCrunch. “We wanted to find the right problem to solve, so we started exploring ideas and comparing challenges we saw in different regions.”
From food delivery to eyewear sales
The founders brainstormed 87 ideas, filtered the options through a list of 15 criteria, and after six months of evaluation, they settled on the eyewear market, a very different industry than food delivery.
They found that demand for eyewear was growing significantly, but supply was not keeping up. Myopia was increasing in the region’s relatively young population (the prevalence of myopia and high myopia in the UAE is around 27%, according to one study). Additionally, local eyewear companies focused only on in-store sales and did little e-commerce, and their brands were neither affordable nor geared toward the mass market.
With no prior experience in the eyewear industry, Eyewa started by selling eyewear brands online for two years, including Ray-Ban, Gucci, Prada, and Johnson & Johnson.
By then, we had enough data on customer behavior – including cart additions, website searches, and purchasing patterns – to design and launch our own brand. Eyewa now has nine exclusive brands catering to a variety of preferences, from older customers looking for functional eyewear to younger buyers looking for trendy options. Currently, 96% of Eyewa’s revenue comes from these private brands, which, according to the company, have been key to maintaining affordability in mass markets, including smaller cities across Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. .
Unlike traditional retailers that treat customers like patients and sell expensive brands like Prada in a sterile environment, Eyewa sells eyewear, including prescription glasses, as fashion accessories.
“We’ve changed the way we look at the eyewear experience, from a choice standpoint, to what customers really care about is fashion,” Co-CEO Oudghiri said of the call. “So we’re managing that with a focus on the retail experience and the healthcare side. We will provide you with very high quality lenses and thorough eye examinations, ensuring the highest health quality for the glasses you purchase. But what we want to drive in the retail experience is fashion.”
Eyewa also keeps its prices low. In the Gulf region, Eyewa’s entry-level glasses (including lenses) cost about $100, about 50 percent cheaper than similar products available in traditional stores.
Expand your omnichannel experience
Eyewa, an e-commerce platform, only served customers who already had a prescription and knew which glasses they wanted. But it’s not exactly mass market. So, with the Covid lockdown slowly easing, we started opening our retail stores in December 2020.
This move helped us reach a wider customer base, as most eyewear shoppers still prefer the experience of trying on frames and completing their purchase in-store. This also allowed Eyewa to manage the entire customer journey by offering vision tests that were only available in physical stores with optometrists and exam rooms.
To expand these efforts, Eyewa raised a $21 million Series B in 2021 from several investors including Nuwa Capital and Endeavor Catalyst, and has since grown to own and operate 150 stores, all without franchises. The startup, which currently employs 1,300 people, claims to be the largest eyewear brand in Saudi Arabia by store count and the fastest-growing eyewear retailer globally.
To put this growth in perspective, a global benchmark like Warby Parker took seven years to grow from its first store to 100 stores, while Lenskart in India took about six years to achieve the same milestone.
“We are the fastest growing company globally. However, across all categories in the GCC, no other retailer has grown to 100 stores in less than four years. So we executed really, really quickly,” Boumediene said.
Boumediene declined to disclose how many glasses the company has sold since launch, but said Eyewa is highly profitable and sales are growing more than 50% year-over-year. The company plans to add at least 100 more stores in six countries in 2025, including its next market, Qatar. It will also open a production facility and fulfillment center in Riyadh in the next quarter, the executive said.
With this round, General Atlantic joins a growing list of U.S. investors deepening their presence in the GCC by backing startups and building local teams after receiving capital from the region’s sovereign wealth fund.
“There seems to be a lot of new global interest in this region. We have been developing the VC ecosystem over the last five years and a lot of our investments have been made at the early stages,” said Mehdi. “But now more established growth and private equity funds are starting to look at this region and companies like General Atlantic, and hopefully more will follow in the future.”
Badwa Capital and Turmeric Capital also participated in this round.
