Madica bets on Egypt’s circular economy, backing Bekia and Delta Oil

Pan-African pre-seed fund Madica is expanding deeper into Egypt’s circular economy, backing recycling platform Bekia and used cooking oil (UCO) aggregator Delta Oil with up to USD 200k each, according to a press release (pdf) and two separate interviews we did with the fund and Bekia. The two startups are part of a five-company cohort spanning four African markets. The batch also marks Madica’s first investments in Algeria (HR-tech platform Talenteo) and Cameroon (neobank PaySika), alongside Nigeria’s semiconductor startup ChipMango.

Both local companies are funding a change in direction. For Bekia — founded by Alaa Afifi (LinkedIn) to let households and businesses swap recyclable waste for cash, goods, or services — the capital bankrolls a move away from asset-heavy, fleet-based collection toward “Bekia Next,” a digital auction platform aimed at large industrial waste producers. Big corporate clients generating tens of thousands of tons of waste juggle up to a hundred separate aggregators by hand, Madica investment associate Francis Vesta tells EnterpriseAM, with the new layer folding households, small B2B, and industrial producers into one system. Bekia is “moving away from that asset-heavy model, which is what we’re [doubling down] on and are looking to underwrite,” Vesta says.

Bekia: from trucks to subscriptions

Bekia Next has been two years in the making, built on feedback from roughly 50 existing corporate clients — including Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Juhayna, and Tetra Pak — Afifi tells us. The platform, launching around the end of October, lets companies list waste for sale via auction to a network of around 9k Know Your Business (KYB)-verified traders — up from the 20-50 a company could reach manually. Auctions set the price, and verified buyers bid against each other on listed tonnage. “Previously, companies sold waste offline, losing money because they didn’t know the exact market value, and there was a lack of compliance and documentation,” Afifi says.

“Egypt’s recycling sector has always worked — it just worked invisibly, on cash and trust, with no record of any of it,” Afifi said in a statement, adding that “the material itself is a commodity, but the record of it isn’t, and nobody in our market owns that record yet.” Bekia Next turns that record into verified CO2-avoidance certificates for corporate clients — the first feature Bekia sells as a subscription rather than a per-service fee. The B2C side will keep scaling alongside Next, targeting 3x growth, but the primary focus is the B2B layer, Afifi tells us. The USD 200k from Madica is part of a USD 765k seed round that also includes pan-African climate investor Catalyst Fund and Dakar-based Jambaar Capital. Expansion into a second African market — possibly Kenya — is planned for next year.

Delta Oil: supply first

Delta Oil is spending on supply, not customers. “The demand is so huge that right now it’s not being met,” Vesta says. Delta Oil, co-founded by Serag Moussa (LinkedIn), was scouting expansion into Kuwait at the time of the investment and weighing rollouts in Nigeria, Kenya, and Oman — deciding between replicating its own model directly and franchising to scale faster.

The USD 200k is part of a larger round, and Vesta is blunt about what that sum buys: it “may not mean much” at this stage, he says. What Madica — the pre-seed fund affiliated with the USD 850 mn fintech VC Flourish Ventures — is selling is hands-on help to “figure out go-to-market” and pick between those expansion models. Household UCO collection is far more fragmented and harder to crack than standard B2B pickup: “there’s a lot more volume, but it’s very disintegrated,” he adds.

Why Egypt, and why these two?

“Egypt is a large market, but even within a large market, there are sectors that are still relatively underfunded,” Vesta says — and Egypt is “one market that we’re really excited about.” What tipped these two was the founders: both “really understood the problem,” he says, and were taking “vastly different approaches” to the same corner of the circular economy.

Madica typically invests in a founder’s first institutional round — “usually in the range of USD 1 mn or less” — and the check comes with an 18-month program it pitches as the bridge across the gap where founders stall between their pre-seed round and follow-on funding. “That’s where a lot of startups or founders fail — because they don’t have access to this [company] building support,” Vesta says. The program covers investment readiness, go-to-market, early-stage governance, and founder coaching, plus fully funded immersion trips.

IN CONTEXT- Delta Oil moves into a market with an incumbent. Homegrown UCO pioneer Tagaddod has built an international supply network across Europe, Asia, and Africa since 2013 and raised USD 26.3 mn last October to push regional expansion. “[With] the tech and the innovation [Delta Oil] was putting into focusing on serving the B2C market, it seemed differentiated from other players in the space,” Vesta says.

This is Madica’s second known Egyptian investment. The first was Motherbeing, the femtech company behind the Daleela app. Vesta flagged women’s health as the segment Madica is most eager to back locally — “still a very huge problem,” with room for new players — against local fintech and retail-tech, which he reads as already heavily capitalized across Africa’s “Big Four” (Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa).

WATCH THIS SPACE- Bananas into shirts: A third Egyptian circular-economy transaction is already in the pipeline. Madica is running early due diligence on an unnamed startup turning banana-crop waste into textile fiber for global apparel makers. No closing timeline has been disclosed.