Egypt’s Sokna raises $1M SEED round
The End-to-End funeral services provider working to open up the conversation around death, Sokna raises a SEED round to provide consolidated services to help families deal with the loss of life in the healthiest way.
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Egypt-based SOKNA, the startup offering end-to-end funeral services to honor the deceased and ease the process for their families, has closed a $1 million seed round with participation from leading regional and international funds.
The investors include the Silicon Valley-based Mentors Fund, SBX Capital, ACE & Company, and Kabnoury Ventures, in addition to a cohort of highly strategic angel investors including Onsi Sawiris (Co-founder and Managing Partner of New York-based HOF Capital), Dr. Khaled AlMutabagani from Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Sadek El Sewedy and Farouk Kadous of ElSewedy Family Capital, Hisham Halbouny (Partner at London-based Mansour Capital), Mo El-Bibany (Founder and General Partner at Page One Ventures), Youssri Helmy (Founder and Managing Director of ITWorx, CEO of Si-Ware), Mostafa Amin (Co-founder and CEO of Breadfast), as well as senior executives from tech giants Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and other prominent angel investors.
Founded in 2020, SOKNA has set forth to change the perception around post-mortem preparation and funeral servicing, allowing family members ease and access to consolidated services to give them time and mind peace needed to honor both life and death. Sokna’s services include support in releasing burial permits and paperwork, body preparation, cemetery set-up, transportation, hall and condolence service bookings, obituaries, personalized sadaqa giveaways, and post-loss support. “SOKNA’s team operates with an extraordinary unity of compassion and tech-fueled efficiency,” says Onsi Sawiris. “For too long, the funeral industry in Egypt has been largely stigmatized and fragmented. We believe that SOKNA has all the ingredients to radically disrupt this space and we’re excited to back them as they broaden their ambition.”
Egypt’s entrepreneurial scene has been able to expand across industries and explore new opportunities to better society with healthy investor interest in Early-Stage Ventures. As recorded in our State of Startup Funding-2022 Emerging Venture Markets, Egypt was the only geography of the top 5 in MENA to observe a YoY growth in Early-Stage (<$500K) deal share of total transactions in 2021. With investors and angle networks includingFlat6Labs, 500 Global, Falak Startups, Seedstars, Nama Ventures, and AUC Angels the Egyptian VC ecosystem observed a 10PP YoY growth in Early-Stage Deal share, which reflects Egypt’s affinity to explore untapped opportunities in various markets.
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Since launching, the company has enjoyed a rapid expansion - growing threefold in the past year alone. To date, SOKNA has operational partnerships with 20 hospitals and corporates in Greater Cairo alone, has amassed more than 70 partner vendors, and has performed more than 2,500 funerals. The company staffing has expanded accordingly, with 50+ full-time employees providing a full array of professional funerary services from end-to-end. “We’re extremely proud of how far SOKNA has come in a relatively short period of time, and it just comes to show what the power of a truly strong team can do,” says Charles Lorenceau, Founding Partner at ACE & Company. “We were impressed by the fact that Gaballah had quit his impressive career in Silicon Valley working for Google, Facebook, and Adobe, to create this company and that he spent years understanding the local practices and customs behind this major life event. We are confident that he is the best to utilize technology to lead SOKNA and are glad to be part of the journey serving such a noble cause.”
SOKNA is also playing an active role in shifting the culture regarding the willingness to discuss death. The company launched a Pre-Planning Program where people can make logistical decisions early on to guarantee more peace of mind for themselves or their loved ones when the time comes. “We were surprised to find that there is indeed a growing demand for families and individuals to make prior funeral arrangements with us - a discussion which was previously deemed as taboo,” added Ahmed Gaballah, Founder and CEO of SOKNA. Additionally, SOKNA has secured several corporate agreements for employers to support their employees during times of loss by sponsoring, subsidizing, or getting discounted rates for the services as part of their employee benefits.
Giving back to the community, SOKNA has created an ecosystem for everyone involved in the traditional death management services, allowing practitioners more training, more job opportunities, and higher motivation as they work with a team that has a solid vision and purpose. SOKNA intends to grow its team and has broader ambitions to extend its services and products through augmenting its technology to enable scalability and geographically expand to more cities in Egypt in the very near future. “With this new funding and the incredible group of partners that joined us, we are ready to scale across the country and be able to support more families during the difficult times of grieving loved ones,” says Ahmed Gaballah, Founder and CEO of SOKNA. “As a mission-driven team, we always have our ‘why’ at the forefront: to allow people to focus on the farewell instead of the paperwork, and to honor departing souls and their families by alleviating the logistical pain of those moments.”
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