GrowSari

GrowSari is a Manila-based B2B tech platform built to help the Philippines’ more than one million sari-sari (small neighborhood) stores modernize how they operate. Founded in 2016 by a team including Reymund “ER” Rollan, Siddhartha Kongara, Shiv Choudhury, and Andrzej Ogonowski, the company gives store owners access to better inventory sourcing, wholesale pricing, and increasingly, financial and digital services layered on top of the retail relationship.

Rather than trying to replace sari-sari stores with a new retail format, GrowSari’s model works with existing store owners — supplying inventory directly and giving them tools to run a more efficient, better-stocked, and eventually more digitally-enabled small business.

The company raised a $77.5 million Series C round in March 2022 from the International Finance Corporation, KKR, Wavemaker Partners, and Temasek’s Pavilion Capital, one of the larger funding rounds raised by a Philippine retail-tech startup.

Sari-sari stores are a foundational part of Philippine retail and grassroots commerce, but individually they have historically had poor access to consistent inventory supply, wholesale pricing, and modern business tools — leaving them dependent on inconsistent, often more expensive distribution chains.

This limits both the stores' profitability and their ability to expand what they offer their communities, from basic FMCG goods into other services.

Independent sari-sari store owners across the Philippines — a market of over one million small neighborhood retail outlets — who use GrowSari for inventory sourcing and increasingly for additional business services.

GrowSari's differentiation is in building genuine last-mile retail infrastructure for a segment (sari-sari stores) that most e-commerce and retail-tech players ignore because it looks fragmented and informal, rather than trying to disintermediate or replace it.

Backing from major global investors (IFC, KKR, Temasek's Pavilion Capital) at Series C scale signals institutional confidence in this "digitize the existing informal retail network" model as a viable, large-scale business, not just a niche social-impact project.