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Egyptian Ecommerce Startup Wasla Secures $9m To Drive Regional Expansion

February 16, 2022

Egypt’s largest non-bank financial services provider, Contact Financial Holding (EGX: CNFN.CA), has announced the completion of a strategic investment in Wasla, an e-commerce SuperApp. Wasla’s product rollout and geographical expansion will be supported by Contact through a series of investments totaling up to $9 million, with the goal of realizing Wasla’s mission of enabling e-commerce, payments, and credit for wide audiences in emerging economies.

“Having personally worked with the Contact team before, I was always amazed at what they have been able to build as a leading consumer finance platform in the region. This is why we believe this deep partnership, leveraging contacts market position, experience, and fully digitized loan origination process, will allow usto expand our offering catering to the online shopping experience by introducing completely newways to help consumers save money on each online purchase, pay securely, build their credit profiles, and borrow flexibly,” Mahmoud El Said, CEO of Wasla said.

This round aims to speed up the startup’s geographical expansion as well as the implementation of additional features and products including buy now pay later (BNPL).

Wasla ecommerce — The team at Wasla. Source: Wasla

Why The Investor Invested

Contact’s mission to allow tech-first ventures in Egypt’s funding ecosystem is bolstered by this investment. The startup has also acquired some traction. Wasla now has 35 employees, 1.5 million app downloads, 8.5x year-over-year increase in total e-commerce traffic, and a new partnership to expand its services around Africa is the world’s fastest-growing consumer market.

Contact and Wasla will collaborate on realizing the objective of further increasing e-commerce adoption in emerging areas through various tools supported by a new suite of financial services solutions, including online payments and Buy Now Pay Later, as part of this strategic relationship.

Wasla, which will operate as an extension of Contact’s core business, will also help the company to expand into new market segments and attract new user groups.

“With over twenty years of innovation in consumer financial services, this strategic investment demonstrates Contact’s drive to multiply its reach and empower businesses with its advanced credit services platform,” Said Zater, Managing Director and Group CEO of Contact Financial, said. “This partnership comes as Contact continues to extend its credit services platform to serve digital channels. Welook forward to supporting Wasla in its rollout of payments and financing tools, bringing the quality and superior customer experience that has come to be expected of Contact. We will continue to seek new ways with which we can serve our expanding audience with high quality services through a wide variety of channels, continuing to transform the way consumers and businesses access financial services.”

Hazem Moussa, Chairman of Contact Financial, added “We are thrilled to be supporting the Wasla team build out their vision of a digital ecosystem enabling online shopping for all.

Contact (previously Sarwa Capital) is Egypt’s largest consumer financing platform, and has been changing people’s financial lives since 2001. Contact is the first financial services platform in Egypt to integrate innovative credit scoring and collection processes, allowing Contact to engage consumers from the start of their e-commerce journey while they explore, discover, and shop online.

A Look At What Wasla Does

Founded in 2019 by Mahmoud El Said, Serag Meneassy, and Taymour Sabry, Wasla is the first developing markets mobile web browser and desktop extension that lets users save money, pay securely, improve their credit profiles, and obtain access to flexible and convenient financing. Wasla is focused on optimizing the end-to-end online shopping experience. Wasla is currently focusing on improving the e-commerce search and discovery experience by aggregating discounts for a network of over 100 local and regional e-commerce retailers (similar to US company Honey, which was acquired by PayPal for $4 billion in 2019).

Wasla ecommerce Wasla ecommerce Wasla ecommerce

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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

Egypt Startup Wasla Raises $1 million Seed To Scale Business

December 4, 2019

Cairo-based consumer tech startup Wasla has raised $1 million in seed to fuel its go-to-market strategy, grow the team, and introduce new product verticals with a focus on financial inclusion.

“We are very happy to have reached this milestone, we couldn’t have achieved it if it wasn’t for the hard work and excitement put forward by our team. Now, we start to rapidly scale our user base while further developing our two new product verticals which shall be introduced during 2020. Finally, we are grateful to the investors who continue to show their support and excitement to help us build our vision further,” Wasla’s co-founders, Serag Meneassy and Taymour Sabry; and an investment banker Mahmoud El Said said in a joint statement.

Here Is The Deal

This round of funding came from Egypt Ventures, Glint Ventures, and Ebtikar for Financial Investments, with participation from a group of angel investors.
This brings Wasla’s total investment made since its launch in 2018 to $1.2 million.
Wasla claims to have attracted over 100,000 users organically without any marketing efforts since the launch of its beta version in December 2018,

“This initial traction allowed Wasla to prove product-market fit and the growing need for affordable mobile internet,” the startup said in a statement.

Starting with Egypt, Wasla aims to provide free or subsidized internet to over 500 million users in emerging markets (mainly Africa) over the next few years.

“Based on average hourly income, in Africa, the average individual needs to work for 29 hours to be able to afford 2GB of mobile internet, compared to 40 minutes in North America and Europe. With almost 76% of global growth in mobile internet subscribers originating from emerging markets, the problem is only getting bigger,” Wasla noted in a statement.

Why The Investors Invested

Egypt Ventures, the lead investor is an investment firm established in 2017 and seeded by the Egyptian Ministry of Investment and International Cooperation with a mandate of supporting and investing in startups from a diverse range of sectors across Egypt. Egypt Ventures has created a blended finance model through which investments are directed into accelerators, venture capital firms, and startups at the early and growth stages.

‘‘We invest in innovation-driven enterprises led by strong and resilient entrepreneurs that have the potential to create high economic value and compete on an international level. Egypt Ventures aims to cultivate and foster a startup culture in the Egyptian economy, catalyze the development of the entrepreneurship ecosystem, and build economic competitiveness leading to GDP growth,’’ the Ventures stated on its website.

Egypt Ventures invests in high growth startups with strong market potential.

‘‘We look for startups with well-balanced teams driven by resilient leadership, and following a clearly defined path to business scalability,’’ it further stated.

A Look At What Wasla Does

Founded in 2018 by former Rocket Internet entrepreneurs; Serag Meneassy and Taymour Sabry; and an investment banker Mahmoud El Said, Wasla has developed a mobile browser that rewards users with free internet. The users earn points for surfing the web on Wasla Browser and the points can then be used to recharge their prepaid phone lines or pay their bill (in case they have a postpaid connection).

Wasla does this by leveraging digital advertising. The startup allows brands to run targeted ads, in both display and its proprietary conversion formats. Wasla also provides complimentary services including affiliate marketing and field research.

The browser that comes with localized content and aggregated digital services can be used by anyone across the world but currently rewards users (with free internet) only in Egypt.

Wasla co-founders, said that they’ve been speaking to over 10,000 users through daily outbound calls, in-product surveys, and user interviews to validate their next steps,

“We have gathered all that user feedback and have released 11 product versions this year focused on improved performance and stability (reduced app size from 64MB to 20MB on our newest version). We have also been able to organically scale our user base and double our daily engagement from 19min/day to 38min/day while continuing to refine our product and build new features.”

“We also introduced new features such as WaslaFeed, a localized content aggregator that has both a standalone website which has a regional audience, and an API that serves personalized content to Wasla Browser users through the app. In addition to new and wider redemption options for our users through strong and growing partnerships with financial institutions,” they added.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world