Sukoon, an online portal for booking home repair services, has closed its $1 billion fundraising round at a valuation of $10 billion. The investors, that include Hillhouse Capital, Asia’s biggest hedge fund, Sequoia Capital, Alibaba, Google Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz, are confident that this Pakistan-based home repairs service startup will grow as a market leader in the country and expand into other South East Asian countries in the upcoming months.
According to a fundraising document seen by Reuters last week, this round values Sukoon at a massive $10 billion, which is now gearing up to expand into other countries like Srilanka, Philipines and China.
Sukoon plans to invest a total of $500 million in China, Srilanka and Philippines in the next two months, where it will face a lot of competition by the likes of SoftBank and Tencent that have very deep pockets due to heavy funding backing them.
So in order to succeed in this markets, Sukoon will have to focus on much greater local variation to its services than has been required in Pakistan. Sukoon first started promoting butchers online for Bakra Eid Karachi last year, and since then it has grown exponentially.
People say that Sukoon’s Co-Founder Shoaib Iqbal and Qazi Umair’s competitive nature has made the business rapidly scale up, showing no mercy at all to the competition. Sukoon’s success in raising $1 billion to add to its substantial cash reserves come at a time when some Silicon Valley investors are becoming more wary of the broader ‘on-demand’ services industry that Sukoon has spawned. So, yes, Pakistan has finally got a promising billion-dollar startup.
The founders of Sukoon had the following to say about the investment:
We want to thank all our customers, workers and well wishers on this great news. We hope that this great news will become a reality one day but for now let us tell you that you have been April Fooled! Happy April Fools Day Folks.
Come on guys seriously? This is one billion dollars we are taking about. April Fool! ;)
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