For decades, buying property in Egypt meant navigating a fragmented real estate market, relying on personal networks, dealing with commission-driven brokers, and facing developers more focused on selling than serving customer needs.
In 2019, Mostafa El Beltagy, Abdel-Azim Osman, Ahmed Rafea, Mohamed Abou Ghanima, and Aly Rafea founded Nawy to bring transparency and efficiency to the market. Now positioning itself as Africa’s largest proptech platform, Nawy has raised $52 million in Series A funding, led by Africa-focused VC firm Partech Africa, validating its model of combining property listings with brokerage services.
The Series A round, which also includes $23 million in debt financing from Egypt’s top banks, brings the total to $75 million, one of the largest Series A rounds for an African startup.
Co-founder and CEO El Beltagy’s journey into proptech started as a personal frustration. After several years working in corporate jobs across multiple countries, he wanted to invest in real estate in Egypt, a market that many people view as a hedge against inflation and currency devaluation.
However, as he navigated the process of purchasing property, the lack of transparency and the prevalence of biased advice became glaring problems.
“I had no way to look at the market and understand what’s out there, aside from going almost developer by developer, picking up their brochures and asking their salespeople questions, which was highly inefficient,” the CEO recounted. “In this sector, everyone is incentivized to push you one way or another.”
These challenges led El Beltagy to build Nawy to help people buy, sell, invest in, finance, and manage property. Its model, combining a property listing platform with brokerage services, has set it apart in an industry still dominated by agents with entrenched, offline relationships.
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