Pride Capital and Startupbootcamp, have joined forces with key industry giants, including the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Pharos Holding, AlexBank,German Agency for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development (GIZ), Visa, Ayady, Sanad’s Entrepreneurship Academy, and Export Development Bank of Egypt (EBE),bringing together ‘FinTech Cairo’ as the first of its kind FinTech accelerator program to Egypt. The program will come to life across four years and will nurture forty FinTech startups selected among the best in Egypt’s ecosystem.
The Startupbootcamp-Pride FinTech Cairo program seeks to provide industry expertise, exposure, and exclusive access to a network of mentors and experts that most early-stage FinTech startups would not be able to access otherwise.
With the Egyptian government’s commitment to financial inclusion and the recent attention given to digital finance, FinTech is emerging as one of the key verticals in the country’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. Individuals and businesses, especially in lagging regions around Egypt are mostly unbanked and face a lot of hurdles accessing the traditional financial infrastructure. FinTech solutions could address these issues by providing more affordable easy to access solutions, dramatically reshaping the financial services industry through digitization and inclusion.
The intensive six-month program is currently accelerating eleven FinTech startups selected from a total of more than a hundred applications received. Startups will get the chance to benefit from hands-on expertise in business model development, mentorship from industry experts, office space in the heart of Cairo, seed-funding – with the current round being fully funded by Pharos Holding – and access to a global network of investors and corporate professionals from across the financial industry. In addition to the acceleration program; the startups will be taken through a three-month Proof-of-Concept phase to scale their products in collaboration with Startupbootcamp-Pride’s program partners. FinTech Cairo also sheds light on accelerating startups in the fields of Payments, Capital Markets, Identity Authentication, Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) Lending, Microfinance, and Insurance.
Pride Capital is a joint venture between Pharos Holding and Kamelizer. It is Egypt’s first venture capital and early-stage fund, focused only on FinTech. Pride Capital’s mission is to invest in startups, from Egypt and Africa that provide effective and convenient access to financial services. Pride Capital’s founders exhibit a collective experience of over seventy years in the financial and technology industries.
Ranked by Forbes as one of the top ten 10 accelerators in the world, Startupbootcamp is the world’s largest global network of multi-corporate backed innovation programs, which counts over twenty-two accelerators globally and over half of them support startups in the FinTech industry. Startupbootcamp boasts an impressive global track record of accelerating over 700 startups with an average funding amount of 1.168M Euros, at a 76% success rate.
