MNZL, the company behind the first mortgage you can apply for directly from your phone, is looking to raise EGP 2.5 bn through a combination of equity and debt early in the new year, co-founder and Managing Director Ibrahim Safwat (LinkedIn) tells EnterpriseAM.

Why it matters: MNZL has landed the first license in Egypt to offer a fully digital mortgage service. The proptech also has a digital consumer finance license and is the first company in the country to hold dual digital authorizations for secured lending regulated by the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA). (Check out their recent statement (pdf)). The licenses matter because they move MNZL from referral and origination into regulated underwriting — meaning it can offer favorable financing rates, set tenors, and originate loans itself under FRA supervision.

What they’re building: MNZL is looking to build a single, regulated platform that underwrites against both homes and vehicles, rather than remaining a broker or a single-product lender.

What’s that in normie-speak? MNZL is positioning itself as an “asset-backed finance house for households,” built to lend to regular individuals against the assets they already own — or want to buy — rather than pushing unsecured credit.

That opens up some interesting product categories. “We see what assets they possess that they can borrow against,” Safwat tells us. Among the “use cases,” as the tech nerds call them:

  • Borrowing against a home to buy another home;
  • Taking out a mortgage to pay for or renovate a home before, say, renting it out;
  • Paying down what’s owed to a developer to take delivery faster;

Other plain-vanilla options including getting direct financing to purchase a car or other assets.

How does it work? MNZL’s pitch is to compress a regular mortgage process that can take months into a roughly 48-hour digital journey. Customers complete e-KYC from home, upload contracts and bank statements, then get an AI-assisted initial valuation, and sign electronically.

Any physical steps are pushed into the background. “We send someone to do the power of attorney, finish the sale-and-ijara contract — and that’s it,” Safwat says. Where the unit is still under a developer, MNZL uses that POA to place a sales ban directly with the compound. “The developer is the registration authority, so we place a sales ban on the unit,” he explains. In older districts such as Zamalek, the rules are stricter: the unit must be fully registered with a so-called “blue contract” proving beneficial ownership. Anything outside those parameters requires the owner to formalize registration before accessing finance.

Safwat thinks the market opportunity is huge: “Even though Egypt has 43 mn apartments, real estate is an integral part of the mindset of Egyptians — it’s the largest source of wealth,” he says. “Some research says 70%, some says 80% of Egyptians’ wealth is in real estate… but in the end, most of Egyptians’ wealth is in real estate. And nobody knows how to use it to grow this wealth.”

The market has shifted post-the float of the EGP into what Safwat calls “a market of keys, not a market of paper,” saying that delivery matters more than brand names. That shift has widened the arbitrage between primary and secondary units. “An apartment that’s EGP 15 mn primary over eight or nine years, you’ll find it secondary for EGP 5 mn outright today without taking any construction or delivery risk,” Safwat says.

The problem is obvious: “How will you buy this unit when you don’t have the money?” Safwat’s answer is that the secondary market only becomes investable at scale if mortgage finance becomes fast, accessible, and retail-friendly.

The regulations that matter: FRA oversight materially changes outcomes for households. Safwat contrasts mortgage finance with developer installment contracts, where a default can mean losing the unit and forfeiting value. Under regulated mortgage frameworks, the lender must restructure or sell the asset and return residual value to the borrower after recovering what it’s owed.

MNZL is deliberately narrowing its initial universe. “At the beginning, we’re focusing on compounds, plus specific zones in Greater Cairo, Alexandria, and other governorates,” Safwat says. That includes areas such as Zamalek, Heliopolis, Mohandessin, and select Nile Corniche locations, while avoiding blanket coverage of all old-city stock.

Anything regulated by the New Urban Communities Authority is fair game for MNZL. This includes Six of October, Fifth Settlement, the New Capital, Alamein, the North Coast, El Gouna, and other new cities. “Because registration there is clean — we can investigate the creditworthiness of the person and the unit easily,” Safwat says. The logic is simple: start where ownership, registration, and enforcement are clearest — then expand.

Operationally, MNZL is also building around today’s regulatory reality. Until the state’s digital infrastructure is complete, powers of attorney, sales bans, and registration checks still matter — but they are handled by the platform, not the customer. “People don’t register because they don’t feel the apartment is an asset they can borrow against,” Safwat says. “That’s what the Property ID Act will solve.”

Worth watching: MNZL’s longer-term play is that Egypt is moving toward a full digital real-estate stack — starting with a national ID for each property, then digital ownership transfer (DOT, in industry-speak) and remote online notarization (RON). Safwat describes the property ID as the base layer: once a unit has a unique digital identity, transactions can happen on top of it. The next steps, he says, are digital ownership transfer and remote notarization, similar to systems used in the US, the UAE, or Saudi Arabia. “When the process becomes easy, it will spread,” he argues.

BACKGROUND- MNZL raised USD 3.5 mn in a pre-seed funding round in 2023, backed by Flat6labs, Africa-focused P1 Ventures, the UK’s LocalGlobe, Nigeria-based Ingressive Capital, Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups, African fintech investor First Circle, Kenya-based ENZA Capital, Africa-focused Beenok, and other angel investors. Since then, the startup has spent the past two years building out its core technology while operating as a licensed mortgage brokerage. In this role, it acts as an intermediary between borrowers and banks and refers cases to financing companies on a commission-based model, with its platform focused on assessing borrower profiles and creditworthiness.

What’s next: The proptech is gearing up to close a seed funding round in the coming few months and is targeting a total of EGP 2.5 bn in combined equity and debt. With its dual license now in hand, MNZL aims to deploy the full amount over the next 18 months, focused on mortgage finance, ijara and auto loans, and new distributive products that are currently being assessed within the FRA’s sandbox.

Early traction is notable: The app has reached around 80k downloads with limited marketing, Safwat says. The bigger question is execution — asset quality, credit risk management, and how fast Egypt’s broader real-estate digitization agenda moves. If those pieces align, MNZL could end up sitting at the intersection of two overdue shifts: secured lending and digital infrastructure.

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