The Food Lab (TFL), Egypt’s first cloud kitchen services provider, has announced the completion of a $4.5 million pre-seed funding round. This round was co-led by Nuwa Capital, Shorooq Partners, and 4DX Ventures and included investors from all over the world. Al Faisaliah Group and Abdul Majeed Al Hokair from Saudi Arabia also participated in the pre-seed round, as did Japan’s Samurai Incubate and other angel investors.
“Together with our new investors we look forward to building on our leadership position to expand across Egypt. Job creation in the form of strategic hires remains a key priority alongside the further development of our technology. We are also excited to lay the ground-work for expansion to new markets in the Middle East and Africa, which will unlock growth opportunities for restaurants,” Ahmed Osman, co-founder and CEO of The Food Lab said.
Why The Investors Invested
Ghassan Noursi, Venture Lead, Nuwa Capital said, “The Food Lab is offering restaurant owners a solution to the problems posed by the country’s recent trend of de-urbanization, which makes it very difficult for a restaurant to reach any meaningful percentage of a given population. TFL’s founders have really put together an amazing team to help the company scale nationwide, and their singular commitment to improving customer satisfaction is one that I am confident will lead to an ever-improving product stack.”
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“TFL has an incredibly strong founding team with a diverse set of world class skills. They have a big vision for how their platform can revolutionize the food industry in Egypt, and the quality of their products and the fast growth speaks to their ability to translate their talent into results. We’re really excited to be on this journey with them.” Peter Orth, Managing Partner, 4DX Ventures.
Tamer Azer, Partner, Shorooq Partners said, “As investors, infrastructure is in our DNA. The Food Lab is first and foremost an infrastructure company that allows the restaurants we love, to grow and reach more people by giving them access to absolutely everything they need to succeed, from best-in-class ingredients to hard data that helps them serve their customers better. In Egypt’s increasingly more competitive food market, The Food Lab is the best success partner a restaurateur could ever want.”
What The Startup Does
TFL, founded in 2020 by Egyptian entrepreneurs Kareem El Daly, Ahmed Osman, and Wesam Masoud, works with 50+ local champions and international companies to expand their influence in Egypt using the company’s platform. Existing restaurant owners may grow exponentially with The Food Lab, while new concepts can go from concept to debut in just 10 days..
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Kareem El Daly, Founder & President of The Food Lab said, “Our mission is to bridge the gap between restaurants and consumers, and by building technology infrastructure, we are enabling the transformation of Egypt’s Food & Beverage (F&B) industry. In large countries like Egypt, with restaurants and consumers spread out over distances, it is imperative for businesses to create an incredible customer experience irrespective of how small or far the consumers are.”
He continued, “Restaurants powered by The Food Lab can expand quickly, without any capital commitment, while strengthening their brand equity. Our tech infrastructure helps our clients make data-driven decisions whilst delivering Egypt’s highest level of service excellence to the largest number of people. Additionally, customers can benefit from easy access to their favourite restaurants. Together with our investors, we look forward to accelerating a new phase of growth for the F&B industry.”
TFL’s cloud kitchen is supported by a proprietary technology platform that offers end-to-end services for restaurateurs like as procurement, cooking, delivery, and marketing. TFL’s virtual brand consultant, powered by machine learning, provides restaurants with a data-centric dashboard that delivers advice for their brands across operations, finance, menu reengineering, marketing, supplier research, and more.
Through a technology-based platform, the TFL platform delivers scalable growth potential for restaurants. TFL’s technology converts restaurants become data-driven businesses by centralizing company data on a single platform. Restaurant managers may easily access tools for reporting and benchmarking, an analytics platform, customer segmentation and marketing, and measuring growth against industry KPIs.
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TFL’s extensive on-boarding process enables restaurants to debut within 10 days from its shared kitchens while incorporating operational efficiencies from the beginning. TFL democratizes consumer feedback surveys, third-party food safety, and HAACP audits to provide quality control.
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Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
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