Egyptian proptech Nawy has moved decisively from a digital real estate marketplace into structured finance, partnering to launch and close an oversubscribed EGP 443 million ($9 million) mortgage-backed fund.
The fund, launched in partnership with asset manager Synergy Capital, was fully subscribed within ten days. It marks a significant strategic pivot for Nawy, leveraging its financial arm, Nawy Now, to originate mortgage assets and then package them for the capital markets. In other words, Nawy is no longer just a real estate sales platform; it now uses its own financial arm to create mortgages, bundles them into a new type of investment fund, and sells that fund to investors, which instantly frees up its capital to repeat the process. Some sort of
The success of the fund points to strong investor appetite for structured real-labels in Egypt and provides a new template for proptech companies in the region to unlock liquidity and create new revenue streams beyond simple transactions.
A New Financial Product
The “Misr for Financial Investments — First Issuance Fund” is not a typical venture round. It is a transferable-assets fund dedicated to acquiring debt instruments, specifically Ijarah-backed mortgage portfolios.
Ijarah is a common Islamic finance structure equivalent to a lease-to-own model, where the financier buys an asset and leases it to the customer for a set period, after which ownership transfers.
The fund’s structure introduces two notable firsts for the Egyptian market:
- A New Asset Class: It is the first fund in Egypt and the Middle East to securitise and offer an Ijarah-backed mortgage portfolio to public subscribers.
- Retail Investor Access: It is the first time qualified individual investors have been able to participate directly alongside major financial institutions in a mortgage-backed, fixed-income product.
This “democratisation” is reflected in the fund’s subscription numbers: retail investors accounted for 22% of the total subscriptions.
The fund also secured heavyweight institutional backing. Cornerstone investors included Al Baraka Bank, Garhy Group for Investment & Development, Allianz Life Insurance, Misr Insurance Holding, and Mohandes Insurance.
“For the first time, mortgage-backed structures have become accessible to qualified individual investors — transforming what was once an institutional domain into a democratized investment class,” said Mohamed Seddiek, Founder of Synergy Capital, which managed the issuance through its arm MFIC.
The Proptech-as-Financier Strategy
For Nawy, the fund is the logical conclusion of its push into embedded finance. The company’s “Nawy Now” product offers rapid-approval mortgage solutions and “Move Now, Pay Later” schemes for ready-to-move homes.
This fund provides Nawy with a scalable mechanism to move those mortgages off its own books.
By originating the mortgages and then selling them to the fund, Nawy unlocks its capital, allowing it to finance more home purchases without tying up its own balance sheet. This creates a sustainable cycle: Nawy originates a mortgage, sells it to the fund, and uses the cash to originate another.
“This fund proves that when innovation meets experience and a bold regulator, new opportunities emerge,” said Amr Malek, CFO of Nawy. He noted it demonstrates how a proptech platform can “directly shape financial innovation by bridging real estate with capital markets.”
A Market in Formalisation
The deal was enabled by Egypt’s Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA), which has been actively pushing digital real estate platforms to move from unregulated grey-area operations to formal, licensed structures.
The FRA’s framework for transferable-assets funds (Decree №98/2020) provided the legal foundation for the issuance. This signals a wider trend of regulators guiding tech innovation toward market stability and investor protection.
This sophisticated financial manoeuvre comes on the heels of Nawy securing significant capital. In May, the startup announced a $75 million funding round, consisting of $52 million in equity led by Partech Africa and $23 million in debt financing from local banks.
Nawy has been deploying this capital to build a comprehensive real estate “super-app,” expanding its ecosystem through acquisitions and new verticals:
- Regional Expansion: In July, Nawy acquired Dubai-based fractional investment platform SmartCrowd to gain a foothold in the UAE.
- Value Chain: It previously acquired renovation startup ROA, rebranding it as Nawy Unlocked to offer finishing and rental management services.
- Fractional Ownership: The company also operates Nawy Shares, a fractional ownership tool for the Egyptian market.
With a claimed lifetime transaction volume of $1.4 billion by the end of 2024, Nawy’s new fund provides it with a powerful financial engine to support its “Move Now, Pay Later” product as it scales both within Egypt and potentially into new markets like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.