Shopsy.pk, Pakistan’s leading shopping search engine, announced its rebranding to Prislo.com today as part of an expansion plan to new markets.
Shopsy was launched as a side project by Usama Arjumand, its Co-Founder & CEO, with the vision of helping Pakistani shoppers find the best products and prices.
In 2019, the project raised funding from Sybrid Pvt Ltd (a Lakson Group company) to scale its product nationally. This is also when Faraz Khalid and Sanjay Kumar, Shopsy’s Co-Founders joined the company to enhance its AI and engineering capabilities.
Since then, the Pakistan-based search engine has scaled its user base to 1.2 million monthly users and is currently the second most visited multi-category shopping platform in Pakistan.
The company’s success lies in its unsupervised AI algorithms that help structure and extract data from the web, serve accurate search results, and give price comparisons for products.
“Our focus has been to design unsupervised AI and search algorithms that can scale rapidly with limited resources. This is what allows us to expand to new markets quickly,” said Faraz Khalid, Co-Founder & Head of AI.
But expanding to new markets required moving away from the .pk domain to a .com domain, which unfortunately for Shopsy, had already been taken. This prompted a name change for the company.
“We felt this was a great time to rebrand and re-energize the company to reflect our growing vision and ambition,” said Usama Arjumand, Co-Founder & CEO.
Prislo currently has 8.5 million products from 360 online stores in Pakistan. Whilst this is one of the largest product databases in the country, it’s trivial compared to the number of products and online stores in other markets, where a single platform can easily contain tens of millions of products.
“Prislo’s tech stack and search have been built from the ground up to be able to scale to billions of products. This has been a key design decision in our stack and architecture,” said Sanjay Kumar, Co-Founder & Head of Platform.
In March 2022, the company launched its PPC advertising platform, Shopsy Ads, now renamed Prislo Ads, which drives qualified traffic and sales to online stores in Pakistan. Since the launch, 87 major stores have signed up to advertise on the platform.
Prislo is now in talks with investors to close a seed round to fund its expansion plans. According to Usama, the Prislo team believe they can become one of the fastest-growing tech products from Pakistan on the global stage.
