Tech entrepreneur and Snapcommerce CEO Hussein Fazal co-founded the e-commerce company in 2016. The mobile commerce startup’s first product SnapTravel helps consumers books hotels and flights via messaging platforms.
To date, Snapcommerce has raised over $100 million USD from institutional investors. SnapTravel has built a user base of over 10 million customers, and expects to achieve over $100 billion in total sales this year.
Fazal plans to expand Snapcommerce’s services even further following their latest round of funding. Soon, customers will be able to do much more than just purchase travel reservations using the company’s AI technology. The startup will begin incorporating the purchasing and selling of goods via mobile messaging as well.
Hussein Fazal funds successful startups and helps others
Repeat tech entrepreneur Fazal co-founded his first company AdParlor in 2008. Like Shamim Samadi’s advertising company Beeswax, the platform helps companies manage and optimize their advertising campaigns for Facebook and Twitter. Based in Toronto, Canada, the advertising technology startup has grown into the largest in the world for Facebook. It was acquired by AdKnowledge, a digital advertising and marketing tech company, in 2011. Fazal stayed with the company until 2014.
In 2013, he also began working as a Mentor for like-minded entrepreneurs. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the venture capital firm 500 Startups has a mission to uplift talented and driven entrepreneurs. He also holds board and advisor roles at Techstars as a Mentor, and at CrowdRiff as an Advisor.
“You’ve just got to go and do it,” Fazal tells Millionaire Interviews. “[The] business you end up building is never going to be your initial idea…you pick an industry or space that’s interesting to you and that has a big market. You find smart people to work with and you just…try a whole bunch of different things in that space until something clicks.”
Hussein Fazal leaves a big Company to start his own
Fazal earned his bachelor’s in mathematics and computer science from the University of Waterloo in 2005. He went on to work as a Senior Software Developer for Bell Canada for 3 years. During his last months with the company, Fazal started experimenting with developing third-party apps for Facebook. He left to launch AdParlor.
“I was at Bell Canada, I was a developer for two years, and I realized that I really don’t like what I’m doing,” Fazal shares with Millionaire Interviews. “And I knew I had to make a change, I knew I didn’t want to work for a big company. I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. At that time, that’s when Facebook started to allow third-party developers to build on the platform.”
“We decided to build an ad network which would allow apps to promote other apps within Facebook…These big companies were building all these games and they were looking to drive traffic to their apps,” Fazal said about growing AdParlor.
“There was this amazing opportunity with the Canadian government. They would help relocate us to Silicon Valley…I moved into Palo Alto with this Facebook ad salesguy. I learned a ton about how Facebook advertising works, and it really changed our business.”
Snapcommerce plans to expand using latest funding
Snapcommerce’s flagship product SnapTravel uses AI to find and book flights and hotel rooms over messaging platforms such as SMS and Facebook Messenger. A leader in mobile commerce, SnapTravel boasts the quickest quality bookings for the lowest comparable price.
The Toronto-based company has secured $107 million CAD ($85 million USD) in their latest funding round. Fazal plans to use this money to expand beyond travel into becoming a message-driven mobile commerce leader across a variety of business niches. In addition to purchasing flight tickets and hotel rooms, the company plans to offer the ability to purchase goods to consumers in the future.
“[Snapcommerce will now] be able to grow faster and eventually get to that point where we could take the company public and execute on that bigger vision of changing the way people shop on their phones,” Fazal told betakit in an interview.
The round was co-led by Inovia Capital, a venture capital firm and long-time supporter, and Lion Capital, an international private equity firm. Additional investors included existing contributors Telstra Ventures and Bee Partners as well as new participants Acrew DCF, Thayer Ventures, and Full In Partners.
Find out more at the Snapcommerce website.
