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Egypt-based FinTech and company expense management solutions provider HollyDesk has successfully raised $325K in a Pre-Seed round led by angel investor Faisal Abdel Salam with the participation of other key strategic investors.
Founded in June of 2021, HollyDesk provides Tech solutions to help small and medium-sized businesses monitor and control company's daily expenses anywhere in real-time. Through consolidated and highly accessible platforms, employees can request all petty cash and custody through the Hollydesk application, which connects and teams all members of the company within the system. The application makes member communication instantaneous for swift requests and approval where settlement can take a few minutes.
As observed in our Q3 2021 EVM FinTech Venture Investment Report, FinTech startups in MENA have been recording a drop in Early-Stage deals (< $500K), where Early-Stage deals accounted for 8% of total FinTech transactions in 2018, yet only 1% of total transactions by Q3 2021. This comes at a time when startups like Tabby, BitOasis, Tarabut Gateway, Dopay, and Paymob have raised major rounds in 2021 to drive Later-Stage Deal ( $10M- $100M) share up 10 percentage points since 2020. While FinTechs in markets like Egypt and Pakistan have been able to capitalize on a widely unbanked demographic, FinTechs in more established markets like the UAE or Turkey have been tapping into instant accessibility through Tech optimization. While we can spot a difference in maturity and investor focus between ecosystems in EVMs, the median size of SEED rounds was highest in nascent FinTech ecosystems like Pakistan ($2M).
The platform integrates with financial aggregators so employees can receive money through banks, digital wallets, and pos machines for electronic payment companies such as Fawry. Employees can easily register suppliers, attach invoices, get approvals and pay the supplier from within the application. HollyDesk CEO Mahmoud Moussa expressed his vision for the Cairo-based team in light of this new investment "We see a great opportunity in the field of digitizing the follow up on companies' expenses, and this is only the beginning; we aspire to what is greater than that by providing other solutions such as financing to help these companies achieve greater growth for this sector."
Hollydesk solutions help companies better manage their resources efficiently and shorten the cache cycle. Moussa says the startup has been able to expand its solutions and services during the last period to include more than 3000 clients from companies in different sectors such as building, construction, and delivery, as well as start-ups, and NGOs. HollyDesk plans to utilize its newly acquired funds to develop its Tech stack, assign new competencies within the team, develop its product offering, and expand into new markets.
Anchor Angel Investor Faisal Abdul Salam concluded Mahmoud Moussa said, "We seek to use the new funding to develop technologies for our solutions, assign new competencies within the team, and launch other services that will be announced soon with major Egyptian banks, which is in line with the Egyptian government's plans to achieve financial inclusion, especially for workers within small and medium companies.“We are very happy to participate in driving the growth of the company, especially as it provides digital solutions that fill a gap that many companies in the Middle East and North Africa suffer from, especially small and medium-sized companies. One of the most important reasons for the success of startups is the extent of harmony and integration of the work team, as well as the strength of their belief in the idea of their project, which we felt from the Hollydesk team, and encouraged us to invest and support them."
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