Cairo-based Pravica, (previously known as Dmails) a WEB 3.0 Email Service Provider (ESP) using Blockchain technology has announced today, that the company has closed its pre-seed round of US$500,000, recently. The round was led by 500 Startups, the most active venture capital firm in the MENA, with the participation of Modus Capital and DYRES Ventures. 

“We are excited to have such strong investors who recognize Pravica’s early achievements, are confident in our growth potential, and actively support our vision and values. We look forward to working closely with them and achieve our short-term and long-term goals,” Abdou, Founder and CEO of Pravica said. 

Here Is What You Need To Know

• With this new funding, Pravica, the most active startup in the Blockstack ecosystem, will aggressively build its customer base, expand its team, and accelerate product expansion by developing additional private communication tools.

“As the first Blockchain Email Service Provider in the MENA, at Pravica, our strategy is to guarantee the user, full data privacy. Developing a decentralized network on Blockchain was my passion and I have been able to successfully make that dream come true. Today, Blockstack (Software for a user-owned Internet) has enabled us to rapidly expand our client base in a very short period of time and helped us scale to the next level with a solid and scalable Blockchain-based infrastructure. With the new funding, we hope to further expand our offering with several value-added options and grow our footprint,” Abdou said.

Why The Investors Invested

Commenting on the fundraising announcement Sharif El-Badawi, Managing Partner MENA, at 500 Startups said:

“We are excited to have invested in Pravica, which has great potential for growth. Running email systems on blockchain technology like that of Dmails (Pravica) is becoming increasingly imperative to ensure data privacy and security. As Mohamed and his team, work to deepen their platform capabilities, we look forward to supporting them as they cement their position as leaders in this Blockchain space.”

Kareem Elserafi, managing partner at Modus Capital said:

“We are excited to have Pravica as part of our portfolio. Their platform provides a new type of value-add to corporates that is both unprecedented and in notable demand. Its new functionality in addition to security measures gives enterprises a much higher level of control over their data, something they constantly struggle with. The team has produced incredible results thus far and we are confident they will continue on this upward trajectory in the coming years.”

Mahmoud Tawfik, managing partner at DYRES Ventures said:

“We consider Pravica as a visionary startup promoting security and privacy by design in the WEB 3.0 era with a real added value to the Blockchain ecosystem. As per our slogan “We invest in exceptional talents “we are pleased to invest and partner with such disruptive startup led by Mohamed Abdou”

Read also: CDG Invest Pours About $1.7 Million Into Seven Moroccan Startups In The First Edition Of 212 Founders

A Look At What The Startup Does

In April 2019, Dmails was founded by Mohamed Hussein Abdou, which was rebranded Pravica in March 2020. As is a software engineer with 20 years of experience in information security and cryptography, he had noticed that emails were a consistent channel of communication that everyone used but lacked data security, a pain point for many. Inspired by this, after much research and hard work, he successfully developed an innovative platform based on Blockchain technology which guarantees the highest security standards for corporates communicating via emails and other communication tools.

Pravica is a unified communication suite, which meets the WEB 3.0 standards and utilizes Blockchain technology to empower user’s privacy and security. All identities registered using Pravica infrastructure are not hosted on any servers, it lives on the decentralized network. This means that all your personal information will be kept private and no one can sell to a third party.

“Pravica is one of the top apps built on Blockstack in 2019, not only did they get high ranks in our app mining program, but they’ve bootstrapped using the initial app mining payouts to then raise venture capital. Their approach to finding concrete business models around privacy and security stands out in the decentralized apps industry,’’ Muneeb Ali, Co-Founder and CEO of Blockstack said. 

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer.