In a continent where venture capital often flows in silos, a rare cross-continental bridge was built this week. Yakeey, a Moroccan property technology (proptech) startup, has closed a $15m Series A funding round, marking the largest of its kind in the Kingdom’s history.

The transaction is notable not just for its size, but for a curious guest at the table: Enza Capital, a Nairobi-based firm. The Kenyan VC’s entry into Casablanca signals a shift in the African tech landscape, where regional boundaries are beginning to blur in the pursuit of fixing one of the continent’s most ancient headaches: real estate.

A “Trust” Deficit in the Maghreb

For Karim Beqqali, the veteran real estate executive who launched Yakeey in 2023, the Moroccan property market is less of a sector and more of a psychological battlefield. Despite the gleaming new developments in Tangier and Casablanca, the process of buying a home remains, in his words, “long, complex, opaque, and stressful.”

In short, nobody trusts anybody.

Yakeey’s pitch to investors is that it can act as the “trusted third party.” While most property portals are content to simply host photos of living rooms (sometimes even the living room actually for sale), Yakeey operates as a “managed marketplace.” It attempts to reconcile the digital world with the messy reality of Moroccan bureaucracy, connecting buyers, sellers, notaries, and banks into a single ecosystem.

The “Hybrid” Ambition

The $15m round was led by an eclectic consortium. Alongside Kenya’s Enza Capital, the cap table now includes:

• The IFC: The World Bank’s private-sector arm, playing the role of the sophisticated institutional “patient” investor.
• Beltone Venture Capital: An Egyptian heavyweight looking to export its regional dominance.
• CDG Invest: Morocco’s own state-backed venture arm, ensuring the national interest is represented.

The business model is what Beqqali calls “human-augmented finance.” It is a charmingly modern way of saying that while the company uses AI and “data-driven valuations” to estimate prices, it still requires a small army of 2,000 human advisors — dubbed YakeeyPRO — to physically visit every property. In a market where a “sea view” can sometimes be a metaphorical concept, Yakeey’s insistence on “certified” listings is perhaps its most radical innovation.

The Regional Arms Race

While Yakeey’s $15m is a landmark for Morocco, it remains a modest sum when compared to its neighbors. Last year, Egypt’s Nawy secured $75m in a mix of equity and debt. However, for Moroccan tech, Yakeey represents a “champion” moment.

The IFC, making its first venture capital investment in Morocco, seems particularly enamored with the idea of “digitalizing the value chain.” For the World Bank, Yakeey isn’t just a startup; it’s a tool for “household financing” and “job creation.” For the average Moroccan homebuyer, it is simply the hope that they won’t have to sign twenty different papers in three different buildings just to find out the apartment was already sold.

By crossing the Sahara, Enza Capital is betting that Yakeey can export its model to other markets with similarly “opaque” characteristics. Whether an algorithm can truly professionalize a sector governed by informal middlemen remains the multi-million-dollar question.

Beqqali’s “success fee” model — where the platform only takes a commission when a deal is actually done — suggests he is willing to put his money where his data is. In the world of Moroccan real estate, that might be the most “transparent” move of all.