Nuwa Capital announced its latest investment in Egypt, through its participation in the pre-seed round of US- and Egypt-based financial infrastructure company MoneyHash, which is emerging from beta today.
The $3M round was led by COTU Ventures, and also saw participation from VentureSouq, Venture Friends, Fox Ventures, and Kepple Africa Ventures as well as regional and global strategic angels such as Baraka’s Feras Jalbout, NerdWallet’s Tim Chen and Belvo’s Oriol Tintore. This round is an extension to an undisclosed six-figure raise announced in 2021.
The company has now launched the Middle East and Africa’s first super-API for payment orchestration, essentially streamlining businesses in emerging market’s payment stack. MoneyHash was founded by Nader Abdelrazik, Anisha Sekar, and Mustafa Eid, who all have prior experience in fintech and startups, working at various companies such as SigFig, NerdWallet, WorldWide Mobility, and Think.iT.
MoneyHash recently emerged from a successful 2021 beta, where it has built a suite of tools backed by user research conducted with over 150 companies. Using one point of connection (MoneyHash’s API), businesses can connect with various service providers across the revenue stack, from pay-in/pay-out providers to KYC providers, fraud detection, loyalty programs and more throughout the Middle East and Africa.
“Reliable online infrastructure is an essential prerequisite to any digital economy. As the regional markets continue their journey towards becoming true digital economies, it is essential that the payment infrastructure keeps up with the rapid pace of the ecosystem’s development,” said Sarah Abu Risheh, Partner at Nuwa Capital.
The current payment and financial infrastructure in Egypt and other emerging markets is weak, and that often leads to many areas of friction. Adding upon that, businesses today waste hundreds of hours building their in-house payment stack, oftentimes spending 3-10 weeks adding a single provider. MoneyHash’s platform solves these problems by giving companies a variety of APIs to choose from off a single connection point, greatly reducing the time they spend on creating new connections while increasing the number of total connections available to them. It also offers a variety of services on top to empower businesses to grow and optimize their revenues without breaking the bank.
“Building startups
is hard and building infrastructure products is much harder. That’s
why having the right support from the beginning is a
key ingredient to our growth. Nuwa team is a founder- friendly and hands-on investor, and they bring value and
sophistication across the board. As we launch our products across
the region, Nuwa’s
expertise in MENA has been a great
asset to us,
and we share a very ambitious plan for the region’s fintech ecosystem. Very excited to have them aboard.” said Nader Abdelrazik, CEO at Moneyhash.
“We are very excited to partner with such a strong founding team at MoneyHash who are uniquely positioned to solve for an extremely fragmented payments market within the region and drive significant value to merchants,” said Abu Risheh.
MoneyHash will use this round to continue building out its tech team, and make strides toward achieving its ultimate vision of becoming the largest network provider in the Middle East and Africa by late 2022.
