5 Start-ups in the Middle East to Watch Out in 2021
The UAE is famous for many things: Some of the important legends will be the city of Dubai, where the rich and famous live with their glamourous cars. Another noted thriving legend recently will be the well-developing start-ups.
Although the recent pandemic hit harder very much like in the entire world, still some companies thrived this pandemic incredibly quickly by consulting and surpassing customer needs.
Investors have been funding about $150 MM Series E-Investment in EPMG, and that was considered being an enormous investment in the region.
In the pandemic's mid the investors didn’t pull back their funds but they altered it into larger stage deals and more proven opportunities. We know UAE is currently home to 33 of the region’s highest-funded startups, Saudi Arabia with 7 startups and Egypt with 4.
Most active investors in the MENA region were 500 startups with 10 investments, RAED ventures with 8 investments, and WAMDA capital with 7 investments.
Although they faced challenges in the global pandemic, 29 startups in the UAE together raised a splendid funding pull of $425 million in 2020.
The popular startup techs in MENA in the year 2020 are FinTech, Agritech, Transport, and Delivery.
Let’s leap into the startups that made it to the top list:
Nana is the Instacart for Saudi Arabia.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Instacart increased its order volume upto 500% and doubled its valuation upto $20 Billion.
Founded in 2016, Nana raised upto $29 million from investors. This startup currently serves 14 cities across Saudi Arabia. It has partnered with local supermarkets like Carrefour, Panda, Spar, Farm Superstores, and Manuel.
Fintech has explored across the Middle East for the past 5 years.
They launched NymCard in the year 2018 to supply a modern cloud-based card issuing and transforming policies for these emerging fintech startups and renovate MENA banks.
Recently, NymCard has signed partnerships with Visa and Mastercard. As banks updated their technologies in the Middle East and new Fintech startups continue to transpire, NymCard is in a much better position to serve their card issuing and payment processing demands.
Tabby, established in 2019, is a buy-now-pay-later startup based in Dubai. The company partners with retailers to provide their customers, both online and in-store, the potentiality to delay paying for their purchases for upto 30 days or to pay in installments for four months at no cost for the shoppers.
The company received funds in their December 2020 Series A from major Abu Dhabi investor Mubadala Investment Company. Also, the company has partnered with Visa and joined the Saudi Arabian Central Bank’s regulatory head for Fintech firms in the same year.
Tabby is in a better position in 2021 to aid from the customer demand for this service.
Mamo Pay, a Dubai-based peer-to-peer (P2P) payment app, started on December 2020. In short, it is called Venmo for Dubai.
P2P is a wedge in markets in the Middle East for landing-and-expanding into related financial services.
Although they are in the early stage, they have got many users who are actively using this platform to issue them enough scale to increase auxiliary services.
Many startups have disrupted transportation in MENA, for the last 5 years. Load-Me launched in 2016, is another name in the fast-growing startup.
They have clients like Unilever, P&G, Kuhne+ Nagel. It has raised $6.3 million to launch its technology in 2020.
