Top 5 MENA startup fundings in October 2019
This month we saw over 15 fundings take place in the MENA region. Following are the five startups who received the largest tickets. Check out their details below:
Bayzat: $16 million in Series B
The HR and insurance solutions platform raised $16 million in Series B this month, led by Mubadala and Point72 Ventures, and saw participation from Elm, Greyhound Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, and Tech Invest Com. This raises their total funding to $31 million, as per statement issued.
Founded in 2011 by Talal Bayaa, Tarek Bayaa and Brian Habibi, the platform has gained significant traction in the market, and counts The Luxury Closet and Deliveroo amongst its customers.
Earlier this year, the company launched its own fintech products including EarlyPay on its platform to give employees unique benefits that may not be otherwise accessible to them given the size of their companies.
AlMentor: $4.5 million in Series A
An e-learning platform catering largely to the Arabic-speaking audience, Dubai-based AlMentor raised $4.5 million in Series A earlier this month. The round was led by Sawari Ventures, a venture capital firm from Egypt. The latest funding takes the startup’s total investment to $8 million as per the statement.
The startup was founded in 2016 by Ihab Fikry, Ibrahim Kamel, Abdelrhman Fahmy, Hesham Heikal and Husni Khuffash.
“Already we have more than 10,000 videos online and we hope to use this investment to further avail our audience to even more enriching learning experiences, in the process helping young people enhance their personal development and confidence while increasing their knowledge base,” said Ihab Fikry, CEO and co-founder of almentor, regarding his plans with the latest investment.
Meddy: $2.5 million in Series A
Meddy, the platform to book appointments with healthcare providers in the UAE, has raised $2.5 million in their Series A. The round was led by Modus Capital, with participation from 212 Capital, QSTP, Kasamar Holdings, Dharmendra Ghai (Health Tech Angel), Innoway and others.
Haris Aghadi, CEO of Meddy, told SME10X that “Our mission is to help healthcare providers attract new patients and improve patient experience. We improve their online presence by focusing on quality content and building modern consumer products to make it easier for patients to find information and book appointments with them. We take care of their online presence so they can focus on what they are good at – providing outstanding care to patients and improving their lives.”
Check out his plans with the latest funding here.
Repeat: $2.5 million in Series A
A smart loyalty programme for restaurants, Repeat allows them to dynamically reward customers for their frequency and spend. They’ve now raised $2.5 million in Series A, however, the investors were not disclosed.
Omer Gurel, co-founder of Repeat, said in a statement: “Since going live in Q1 this year, we have already onboarded more than 400 outlets on our platform and increased our clients’ revenue by an average of 25% for all transactions going through the app.”
The startup counts Nando’s, California Pizza Kitchen, Yo Sushi, Burger Fuel, Circle Café, Projeto Acai, Max’s, Yugo and Mizu amongst its clients, and plans to have over 2,000 F&B UAE outlets listed on its platform by the end of 2020.
Unit X: $2 million in Pre-Seed
The artificial intelligence startup raised $2 million in pre-seed round earlier this month, led by Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Ventures. Founded in 2018 by Emad Al Ibrahim, Kiran Narayanan, and Ravi Samtaney, UnitX provides supercomputing on demand.
It currently offers three lines of services as per its website:
UnitX Sentient: Easy workflows that result in a faster time-to-value for machine learning & big data analytics.
UnitX Maestro: Digital transformation through on-premise & edge-to-cloud integration
UnitX Rapidsim: Supercomputing on-demand for virtual prototyping
