Jen Andre 
- Portfolio News
- 17 December, 2024
The Series A fundraise was led by Monashees, Valor, and Balderton. The CEOs of Loggi, Uala, Rappi, and Madeira Madeira also invested.
Merama is hoping to become the largest e-commerce product business in Latin America.Their business model is to partner with the leading existing merchants across Latin America (currently they are focused on Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile) and use their team, capital, and technology to fuel additional hypergrowth.Unlike the dozens of Amazon aggregators that have popped up over the past few years, Merama is solely focused on Latin America, works with very few partners, and does not purchase companies outright. Instead, they are focused on identifying the top few companies in certain major categories and selectively partnering with the best by purchasing a stake in their business.Merama was co-founded by Sujay Tyle, who formerly was Co-Founder and CEO of Balderton portfolio company, Frontier Car Group (sold to Naspers for ~$700M USD in December 2019). Tyle is currently a Venture Partner at Balderton alongside his role at Merama.
Merchants are seeing hypergrowth but still struggle with fundamental problems which creates a ceiling in their potential. For example, they are unable to expand internationally, get reliable and cost effective working capital, build technology tools to support their own online presence. This is where Merama comes in.
Sujay Tyle CEO, Merama
Sujay Tyle
We seek to give our partners an unfair advantage. When we decide to work with a team, it is because we believe they will be the de facto category leader and can become a $1B business on their own. Merama’s team, capital, and technology allows them to do this.
Sujay Tyle CEO, Merama
Alongside Tyle, Merama’s co-founders include French Olivier Scialom (formerly co-founder of Petsy, a pet-focused e-commerce that sold to Maskota) and Mexican Felipe Delgado (formerly CEO and CFO at Beetmann Energy), and Brazilians Renato Andrade (formerly McKinsey BR) and Guilherme Nosralla (formerly Wildlife Studios).Additionally, Merama has built a team of 40 employees, with expertise in marketplaces, retail, technology, marketing, operations, finance, and strategy from companies such as Uber, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Falabella, and Mercado Libre.Merama already operates very profitably and so the additional funding will be primarily used to provide the initial investment into brands, marketing and technology tools to supercharge their growth, and as working capital to fund inventory and product innovation.
In our two decades scaling businesses in Europe, we have seen first hand what defines eCommerce category leaders and we see huge potential for Merama to accelerate the development of leaders in LatAm. We are delighted to backing Sujay again and excited to be working with the rest of the exceptional team. What they have already achieved is breathtaking, and it is just the tip of the iceberg!
Daniel Waterhouse Partner, Balderton
Read more in TechCrunch: “Armed with $160M in funding, LatAm’s Merama enters the e-commerce land grab”
