Cairo-based e-commerce platform Wuilt has raised $2M in a funding round, just months after a radical pivot that saw it eliminate all subscription fees for its merchants in Egypt.
The round was led by follow-on investments from early backers Flat6Labs and MTF VC. New participants included Abu Dhabi’s Hub71, JIMCO (the venture arm of Abdul Latif Jameel), Purity Tech, and a group of strategic angel investors.
The funding follows a bold strategic shift in April 2025. Wuilt abandoned its traditional SaaS model, giving up what it reports as hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual recurring revenue. Its core platform is now completely free for merchants in its home market.
The gamble appears to be paying off in terms of user growth. Since removing the paywall, the company says it has onboarded over 20,000 new merchants.
Instead of charging for access, Wuilt now generates revenue through a suite of value-added services. These include ‘Wuilt Shipments’ for logistics, ‘Wuilt Pay’ for payment processing, and ‘Wuilt Wallet’, a digital wallet solution for its merchants. This model shifts the focus from fixed fees to sharing in the success of its users’ transactions.
“We didn’t pivot just to grow — we pivoted to make growth possible for everyone else,” said Ahmed Rostom, Wuilt’s cofounder and CEO. “E-commerce in our region has always been gated by cost, complexity, and outdated thinking. We’ve removed those gates completely.”
A Journey of Reinvention
This is not Wuilt’s first reinvention. Founded in 2019 by Rostom and Mahmoud Metwaly, the company initially set out to solve a different problem: the difficulty of creating professional, Arabic-language websites.
Pitched as a “Squarespace for Arabic websites,” its first product was a simple, multilingual website builder aimed at users with little technical expertise. This initial vision attracted a $535,000 seed round in 2020, with early support from many of the same investors backing it today, including MTF VC and Flat6Labs.
Even in 2020, however, the founders signalled a move towards e-commerce, with plans to launch a “Shopify-like” platform tailored for the region. This evolution led it from a simple website builder to a subscription-based e-commerce service, and now to its current free-to-use infrastructure model.
Building Regional Infrastructure
The new capital will be used to fuel an aggressive expansion plan. Wuilt intends to launch its free platform in the United Arab Emirates in the final quarter of 2025, with further rollouts planned for other GCC countries and Turkey in early 2026.
The company is also channelling resources into developing AI-powered features to help merchants automate and manage their operations more efficiently.
Wuilt’s long-term ambition is to become the underlying infrastructure for the millions of small businesses and individual social sellers across emerging markets, starting with the Middle East and North Africa. By removing the initial cost barrier, it aims to capture a large and often-overlooked segment of the digital economy that is sensitive to upfront costs. The continued backing from its seed investors suggests confidence in this long-term, volume-based strategy.