MoneyFellows, the Cairo-based fintech reimagining traditional group savings through digital infrastructure, has raised $13 million in a pre-Series C funding round. The round was led by Al Mada Ventures, a Casablanca-based pan-African investment firm, and Nclude Fund by DPI, with additional participation from Partech Africa and CommerzVentures. This funding round brings the total capital raised by MoneyFellows to just over $60 million.

The new investment serves as a strategic bridge toward a larger Series C round planned for 2025. According to the company, the capital will support a shift from its phase of steady, contained growth to aggressive regional expansion, beginning with Morocco. A portion of the funding will also underwrite efforts to secure working capital partnerships with local banks, allowing MoneyFellows to scale its ROSCA-based “circles” more quickly.

The startup’s unique approach — lending billions of Egyptian pounds with minimal debt or exposure to its balance sheet — has already propelled it to profitability in Egypt. MoneyFellows says it now serves over 8.5 million users, up from 4.5 million at its previous funding milestone, and has seen the average payout per user nearly double over the last two and a half years.

Looking ahead, MoneyFellows plans to introduce additional financial products including cards, investments, payroll, insurance, and remittances, moving closer to a digital bank model and entering direct competition with Egyptian neobanks such as Telda, Khazna, and Lucky.

Why the Investors Invested

The conviction behind this funding round lies in MoneyFellows’ disciplined growth strategy, profitability in a challenging environment, and the disruptive innovation it brings to a widely understood but under-digitized financial system — the rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA).

Al Mada Ventures, which led the round, emphasized the company’s ability to modernize an ancient financial system without compromising its cultural integrity. According to Managing Director Omar Laalej, “ROSCA’s are very old financial arrangements, with roots going back hundreds, if not thousands of years. AMV was impressed by the modernized version of this business that MoneyFellows has built — the complexity and sophistication of their platform sets them apart globally.”

From an investor’s standpoint, three core elements distinguish MoneyFellows as a strong bet:

• Unit Economics and Risk Distribution: Unlike traditional digital lenders or Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) providers, MoneyFellows does not rely heavily on working capital to lend. Less than 8% of its active ROSCA slots require capital injection, meaning the majority of lending risk is distributed across users, not centralized on the company’s books. This de-risks the business model and offers a higher margin of safety for investors.
• Profitability and Organic Growth: Achieving profitability in Egypt — a market where few African fintechs break even — is a rare feat. The model also shows strong viral adoption, with users organically expanding the platform by inviting trusted peers into circles. This virality reduces the need for expensive customer acquisition.
• Scalability Across Similar Markets: MoneyFellows’ expansion thesis is backed by strong demographic and behavioral parallels in other African and South Asian markets. Its imminent launch in Morocco is based on both regulatory readiness and the existence of a familiar informal savings culture known as “daret”. The approach aligns with investors looking for pan-regional fintech infrastructure plays, especially in low-trust, low-credit environments.

The company’s success also comes at a time when most fintechs are struggling to raise funding amid global capital tightening. That it could secure growth-stage funding in this climate is indicative of both investor confidence and product-market fit.

A Look at MoneyFellows

MoneyFellows was founded in 2016 by Ahmed Wadi, an Egyptian entrepreneur who experimented with digital ROSCA models in the UK and Germany before bringing the concept to Egypt. The startup’s platform digitizes the traditional savings method by allowing users to form or join ROSCA groups — known locally as “gam’eya” — via a mobile application.

Unlike traditional lenders, MoneyFellows does not lend from its balance sheet. Instead, it serves as a digital matchmaker — aligning borrowers and savers through credit scoring, behavioural analytics, and income tier mapping. When a group (or “circle”) is under-filled, MoneyFellows may step in to finance the missing slot, enabling the rest of the group to remain functional and monetizable.

This low-capital-intensity model allows the company to operate more sustainably than BNPLs or neobanks reliant on high-margin lending and external debt. Despite the inherent challenges of digitizing a highly informal, trust-based financial process, the company has invested years into building a system capable of balancing thousands of ROSCA circles in real-time, minimizing default risk and dropout rates, and optimizing user-to-circle matching.

As of 2024, the company had facilitated over $50 million in investments, built partnerships with more than 350 local and regional organizations, and introduced card products for payouts and repayments, laying the foundation for broader financial services integration.

While Egypt remains the company’s core market, MoneyFellows is preparing to enter Morocco by the end of the year, with sights also set on South Asian markets and other African countries where informal finance remains dominant. The company believes its long-term advantage lies not only in digitization but in the deep infrastructure it has built to emulate trust dynamics digitally — something most competitors have either underestimated or failed to replicate.