Many of the fundamentals of a booming digital economy — including market size, customer pain points, and entrepreneurial talent — have been present in Egypt for quite some time. Indeed, some people may have forgotten the central role Otlob (now Talabat) played in pioneering food delivery here as early as 1999, the same year Seamless, the online food delivery pioneer, was launched in the United States.

Key ingredients: Regulators and investors have historically helped tech entrepreneurs by adding important ‘missing ingredients’ to help grow their businesses, particularly access to funding. With the advent of the venture capital (VC) asset class in Egypt, where annual investment in startups today consistently exceeds half a bn USD — compared with only a few mn annually a decade ago — technology and tech-enabled businesses have emerged as key catalysts of the digital economic transformation in the country.

However, despite this growing interest in startups, today’s Egyptian tech entrepreneurs still need to judiciously deploy their financial resources given the increasing scarcity of equity funding in the current interest rate environment. For those who can, incorporating debt into the capital structure early on has become an effective means of financing local working capital, preparing for international expansion, and improving future valuation and exit options.

A new proposition: HSBC Egypt launched a specialized lending proposition to address this need last year and we have worked closely with several innovative companies in multiple sectors. E-commerce, one of the leading contributors to the total number of VC transactions in Egypt, has emerged as a key opportunity stream for this new proposition.

Taking two recent examples, we provided a working capital facility to MaxAB, a pioneer of the business-to-business e-commerce model, supporting their inventory purchases. Backed by Silver Lake Partners and British International Investment, MaxAB now serves more than 160k retailers across Egypt and Morocco while leveraging economies of scale to drive deeper value creation through significant improvements in how data is managed and deployed.

We subsequently closed a second e-commerce deal in the hotel, restaurant, and catering sector where OneOrder rapidly built out a fulfillment platform — the software that automates the picking, packing, shipping, and tracking of orders, while streamlining inventory management. OneOrder serves almost a thousand restaurants across Egypt and has secured the backing of Delivery Hero among other reputable institutional investors.

International outlook: Beyond a more flexible approach to lending and delivering growth without diluting owner equity, HSBC Egypt brings a powerful combination of international network and digital banking propositions to businesses supported by venture capital. We are excited to support these and other VC-backed entrepreneurs who have innovated and worked hard to position themselves to redefine their industries locally and internationally.

Damien Pieretti (LinkedIn) is head of fintech and innovation at HSBC Egypt.

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