Gjirafa, Inc., is a US corporation, a video content platform, and production studio, and a market-leading e-commerce company; leads a variety of offline to online Internet consumer services in Balkans and Albanian Diaspora. It is the fastest growing Internet Services company in the Balkans and one of the most well-funded VC startups, from globally reputable investors, in Europe. Gjirafa has been ranked #11 on Deloitte Technology Fast 50 growing Central Europe tech companies and implied #1 in the Balkan region with over 1,500% growth in the last four years.
Our vision is to build and facilitate the Internet Economy in the Balkans, by focusing on one core Internet service that lacks in the region for a market of around 12 million people.
Mergim is the Founder & CEO of Gjirafa, Inc, the Albanian Search Engine. Gjirafa has raised $2.5M in angel and venture capital funding, with investors including Rockaway Capital, Esther Dyson, Ondrej Bartos, Phillip Staehelin, Michal Illich, and other reputable investors. An alum of StartupYard 2014, Gjirafa is working to build the Internet Economy and bring state-of-the-art e-commerce solutions to emerging markets in Kosovo, Albania, and the surrounding regions.
Gjirafa.com, announced in 2016 in a joint statement with international tech VC firm Rockaway Capital, a $2-million investment in building key internet services for Albanian speakers in the Balkans, and worldwide. This investment follows Rockaway’s aggressive moves in European e-commerce investments of recent years, and it follows earlier investments in Gjirafa from angel investors, including U.S. angel investor Esther Dyson, Credo Ventures Partner Ondrej Bartos, and Roland Berger Managing Partner Philip Staehelin.
Rockaway’s investment in U.S.-based Gjirafa, was then used to grow online search, e-commerce, and online advertising infrastructure that was sorely lacking in Europe’s fastest-growing region. The deal also calls for Rockaway to commit considerable resources to bring other internet properties to Albanian language audiences and businesses, building up the internet economy in the region in partnership with Gjirafa.com.
“This investment is more than just a bet on the explosive growth potential of the Balkans’ internet economy,” noted Gjirafa’s Founder and CEO, Albanian native Mergim Cahani at the time. “ It’s going to help us accelerate that growth by bringing online services to the region that have never been seen here before.” Cahani, who launched Gjirafa in 2014 at StartupYard Accelerator in Prague, has built the search company into a fast-growing organization, boasting 650% growth from late 2014, over 10 million searches executed, and over 1 million visitors.
Kosovo and Albania, previously lagging behind the rest of Europe in online growth, have taken huge leaps in recent years, as internet penetration has been boosted to over 85% by aggressive modernization efforts, both from European investments and from the return of legions of expatriates following the easing of political tensions in the region in the past decade. The region now enjoys the highest birth rates in Europe, with over 70% of the population under 35, presenting a stark contrast with greying European neighbors.
There’s nothing like a niche language to create a sort of lock-in for a startup, and that’s exactly what’s happened with Gjirafa. Focusing exclusively on Albanian-speaking countries, co-founder and CEO Mergim Cahani started out developing an Albanian language search engine and then literally digitizing the country’s information, from bus timetables to a database of local businesses and venues, and beyond.
Investors were attracted to this “emerging-market approach” and put in a $2 million Series A in 2016 to “grow the Balkans’ internet economy” by digitizing and indexing information in Albania and Kosovo, thus making Gjirafa the regional leader in search, e-commerce, and online advertising.
In 2019 Gjirafa claimed 3 million monthly unique users across its services and raised a Series B round of $6.7 million from Rockaway Capital, which has been backing the company since 2016. The new funding was intended for scaling the current products regionally.
The Series B allowed the company to double their current team ( 70 full-time, and about 100 in total with part-time), scale with the existing products regionally, and deliver other digital services that aren’t available in the region.
Gjirafa has become the largest e-commerce player in the region, having a leading OTT product: GjirafaVideo and GjirafaStudio, equivalent to Hulu and Netflix; currently has about 1 million minutes of video consumed a day (and growing double-digits on monthly basis) and more than 80 live channels online.
Gjirafa, Inc., is the fastest-growing company in the region, and the growth is impressive at 314 percent CAGR. To put it in perspective: when GDP indicators are normalized for the Balkans region versus the U.S., it has an equivalent revenue growth as Google had between 2001-2004 and continuing on the same path.
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