Odiggo, an Egyptian based startup that digitally connects auto repair companies to vehicle owners, has raised US$2.2-million in equity funding led by Y Combinators with the participation of Plug and Play Ventures, 500 Startups, Seedra Ventures, LoftyInc Capital and the CEO of Volta Trucks (Essa Al-Saleh). Odiggo charges a commission for this service which provides a convenient way of buying car parts as well as ensuring that original car parts are sold to customers through a reliable network of parts suppliers. Odiggo was originally established in 2017 by Ahmed Omar, Wissam Saleh, Khalid Omar and Ahmed Nassar and has processed over 10,000 customer transactions.
Y Combinator is global VC firm that provides seed funding for startups to get startups through the first phase to build a business impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale and typically introduces the startups to later stage investors. Y Combinator invested in well-known startups such as Doordash, Dropbox, Airbnb, GitLab, Flexport, Instacart, Coinbase, Reddit and Stripe among many others. Y Combinator has 18 companies in its portfolio that are valued at over US$1-billion and has raised over US$25-billion from investors. Plug and Play is a Silicon Valley venture capital firm established in 2006 to manage acceleration incubators and venture capital investments and now manages 50 industry themed accelerator programmes, innovation hubs for 400 large corporations and provides venture capital to over 250 startups a year.