ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Walee Technologies Pvt., which connects social media influencers with companies, has acquired UAE-based Mirrorr.com, paving the way for entering the Middle East and North Africa regions, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. 

Walee acts as a marketplace for companies including Samsung Electronics Inc. and Reckitt Benckiser Group LLC to find and pay influencers to promote their brands. Walee has more than 100,000 influencers including rapper-comedian Ali Gul Pir and online celebrity Waliya Najib in Pakistan.

Mirrorr is a  mass market tool that detects and identifies brands and logos in posts and stories through AI.

"This acquisition gives the company [Walee] an AI-driven analytics solution that detects and identifies brands and logos in content posted on social media channels," the platform said in a statement.

The acquisition comes as companies and brands are shifting advertising spending online, including to influencers on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. 

"Brands are changing their strategies to cater to young consumers who make decisions based on trusted social profiles rather than company communication," Najib Sabbagh, head of MENA region at Walee, told Bloomberg.

To sign up for Walee, influencers should ideally be at least 18 years old, have a CNIC card and at least 1,000 people in their main social media network comprising, for example, authentic followers, friends, family, classmates or colleagues. They can be based anywhere in the world, but will need to have an account with a Pakistani payment provider such as JazzCash, or a bank, to receive payments.

In 2021, Z2C Limited made a $2.7 million investment into Walee.

“Since 2019, advertisers and agencies in the region have relied on the Walee ecosystem to advance influencer marketing campaigns and utilize social listening tools,” Ahsan Tahir, co-founder of Walee, said in a media interview last year. “This equity financing from Z2C comes as Walee scales to meet strong demand in the region pertaining to influencer search, campaign management & measurement.”

“Walee’s data-driven content analysis and influencer ecosystem approach is a paradigm change for the media and advertising industry,” Fatima Hyder, group chief strategy officer at Z2C Limited, said last year. “Given our ongoing investments across OTT, eCommerce, and eSports platforms, the inclusion of Walee fits perfectly into our vertically integrated business strategy. We understand, better than most, how challenging it is to build a business from scratch and to scale it amidst the pandemic.”