Helping consumers find the perfect glasses is a booming global business, spawning giants like Warby Parker in the U.S. and Lenskart in India. In the Middle East, this market is producing its own rising powerhouse: 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 across five Mideast markets.
Now, the company has raised $100 million Series C round. The round, led by global growth investor General Atlantic, brings Eyewa’s total funding to $130 million since its 2017 launch.
Founded by Anass Boumediene, Mehdi Oudghiri, and Abdullah AlRugaib – all former Bain & Company consultants – Eyewa initially entered the eyewear market as an e-commerce retailer for third-party brands. However, the company soon launched its own brands after identifying unmet needs in the Middle East.
Between 2015 and 2017, co-CEOs Boumediene and Oudghiri led Foodpanda’s regional operations under Rocket Internet and DeliveryHero ownership. Their experience scaling the food-delivery business – which they claim to have grown 50x in three years and taken to profitability – motivated them to start their own company.
“After our time with Foodpanda, we were hooked on entrepreneurship and knew we wanted to start something of our own,” shared co-CEO Boumediene on a call with TechCrunch. “We wanted to find the right problem to solve, so we started exploring ideas and comparing challenges we saw across different regions.”
From delivering food to selling eyeglasses
The founders brainstormed 87 ideas, and after filtering options with a list of 15 criteria and conducting a six-month evaluation, they landed on the eyewear market, a vastly different industry from food delivery.
They discovered demand for eyewear was growing significantly, but the supply wasn’t keeping up. Myopia was rising in the region’s relatively young population (one study shows that the prevalence of myopia and high myopia in the UAE is around 27%). In addition, local eyewear companies were focused on in-store sales, rarely did any e-commerce, and their brands weren’t affordable or tailored to the mass market.
With no prior experience in the eyewear industry, Eyewa started by selling eyewear brands, including Ray-Ban, Gucci, Prada, and Johnson & Johnson, online for two years.
By then, 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 proprietary brands for diverse preferences, from older customers seeking functional eyewear to younger buyers looking for trendy options. Currently, 96% of Eyewa’s revenue comes from these in-house brands, which, according to the company, has been key to keeping prices affordable for the mass market, including smaller cities across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman.
Eyewa markets its eyeglasses, even the prescription ones, as fashion accessories, unlike traditional retailers, who tend to treat customers as patients, selling expensive brands like Prada in sterile settings.
“We kind of turned around the way we look at the eyewear experience, where fashion is the thing that customers really care about from a choice perspective,” co-CEO Oudghiri commented on the call. “So that’s what we focus on in the retail experience and the health care aspect, we take care of it. We’re going to give you very high-quality lenses and exhaustive eye tests, and we’ll make sure that you have the best health quality for the eyewear that you buy. But what we want to push in the retail experience is the fashion.”
Eyewa also keeps prices low: In the Gulf states, Eyewa’s entry-level eyeglasses, including lenses, are priced around $100, approximately 50% less than similar products available in traditional stores.
Scaling its omnichannel experience
As an e-commerce platform, Eyewa exclusively served customers who already had prescriptions and knew the glasses they wanted. But that’s not exactly a mass market. So it began opening retail stores in December 2020 as Covid lockdowns slowly lifted.
The move allowed it to reach a broader customer base, as most eyewear shoppers still prefer in-store experiences to try on frames and complete their purchases. This also allowed Eyewa to own the full customer journey by providing eye examinations, which could only happen in physical stores equipped with optometrists and exam rooms.
Eyewa raised a $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 wholly 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 eyewear retailer globally.
To put this growth into perspective: global benchmarks like Warby Parker took seven years to grow from their first store to 100, and Lenskart in India took about six years to achieve the same milestone.
“We’re the fastest growing globally, but even across categories in the GCC, no other retailer in any other vertical did one store to 100 in less than four years. So we really executed super fast,” Boumediene remarked.
Boumediene declined to disclose how much eyewear the company has sold since its launch but did say Eyewa is profitable and growing at over 50% year-over-year in revenues. The company intends to add at least 100 more stores across six countries, including Qatar, its next market, in 2025; it will also open a production facility and fulfillment centre in Riyadh next quarter, said the executive.
With this round, General Atlantic joins a growing list of U.S. investors deepening their presence in the GCC by backing startups and establishing local teams, after receiving capital from the region’s sovereign wealth funds.
“It seems there is a lot of newfound global interest in the region. We’ve had the VC ecosystem develop in the last five years, and many investments happen in early stage,” commented Mehdi. “But it’s great to see now more established growth and private equity funds starting to look at the region and the likes of General Atlantic coming, and hopefully many more that will follow.”
Badwa Capital and Turmeric Capital also participated in the round.
