When Flextock announced a $12.6 million Series A round this week, most of the attention landed on TLcom Capital, the Africa-focused fund making a conspicuous pivot into MENA cross-border commerce. But buried in the list of participating investors was a name that carries particular symbolic weight in Cairo’s startup circles: MSA Capital.
The Beijing-based venture firm was once among the most active early-stage investors in Egypt and the broader African tech market, writing cheques into companies like SWVL, Rabbit, TradeDepot and AutoChek in the early 2020s. Then came a period of conspicuous quiet — shaped, in part, by a spectacular collapse that left MSA and its co-investors nursing losses and reputational discomfort. Its return to Egypt, however modest in ticket size, signals that the firm has not entirely given up on the country.
The Collapse That Changed the Calculation
To understand why MSA’s return matters, it helps to recall why it stepped back.
In 2021, the firm was among the investors that backed Capiter, a Cairo-based B2B e-commerce platform targeting fast-moving consumer goods. The company had raised $66 million in total, including a $33 million Series A, from a roster that included Shorooq Partners, Foundation Ventures, Quona Capital, and MSA Capital. At its peak, Capiter claimed 50,000 merchants and revenues approaching $500 million annually.
By September 2022, it had imploded. The co-founders — brothers Mahmoud and Ahmed Nouh — were removed by the board after failing to appear for due diligence meetings ahead of a potential merger. Reports of mismanagement, salary freezes and unexplained financial flows had been circulating internally for months. When the news broke publicly, former employees took to social media with accounts of poor governance, opaque decision-making and a culture that prized expansion over fundamentals.
“We have no idea who is running the company at the moment,” one Capiter employee told Wamda at the time. “The founders just disappeared.”
At least one early investor wrote the company off entirely. MSA did not comment publicly, but the episode — combined with broader macroeconomic turbulence affecting Egypt — appears to have contributed to a period of low deal activity in the country. The firm’s investments in 2023 and much of 2024 leaned toward geographical diversification away from North Africa.
The $1 Billion Ambition
Despite the setbacks, MSA Capital never abandoned its MENA thesis entirely. In 2024, managing partner Ben Harburg publicly outlined plans to raise a $1 billion fund targeting pre-IPO startups across the broader MENA region, including North Africa. If successful, the vehicle would be the largest venture fund in the Middle East, surpassing Saudi Technology Ventures’ $500 million debut fund.
The firm had previously raised $555 million across three Gulf-focused funds, with backers including Saudi Arabia’s Jada and SVC, and Bahrain’s Al Waha. The new fund represented an explicit statement of intent: MSA still believed in the region’s long-term trajectory, even after absorbing losses on bets like Capiter.
Whether that fund has successfully closed remains unclear. What is clear is that the Flextock investment — a smaller, earlier-stage cheque — suggests the firm is willing to re-engage with Egypt at the foundational level while larger capital raises remain in process.
What Flextock Is Building
Flextock was founded in early 2021 by Mohamed Mossaad and Enas Siam. The company pitches itself as an integrated operating system for e-commerce merchants — combining warehousing, last-mile delivery aggregation, cross-border logistics between Egypt and the Gulf Cooperation Council, and embedded merchant financing under a single dashboard.
Its Series A, led by TLcom Capital, also drew in Conjunction Capital, Capria Ventures, Access Bridge Ventures, Foundation Ventures, BY Venture Partners, JIMCO, and Alter Global — several of which also participated in Flextock’s $3.25 million pre-seed round in 2021, alongside YC Combinator, logistics firm Flexport, and a Sequoia scout. MSA Capital has been on the cap table since that pre-seed.
The commercial logic is grounded in a real structural gap. Saudi Arabia’s e-commerce market is projected to reach $23.8 billion by 2028. Egypt, meanwhile, has a digital economy estimated at $11.5 billion this year and remains the region’s largest consumer population. Yet the logistics corridor connecting the two markets is fragmented and costly for small businesses. Cash-on-delivery remains the dominant payment mode in many parts of both countries. Cross-border customs compliance is complex. Working capital access for SMEs is limited.
Flextock’s two proprietary modules — Flexborders, for cross-border enablement, and Flexcash, a data-driven financing product — are designed to address these specific bottlenecks. “Merchants don’t need more separate tools,” said Mossaad. “They need an operating system designed for growth.”
The company plans to deploy the Series A capital to expand its merchant base in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, open additional fulfillment centres, and develop the Flexcash product further.
For TLcom Capital, the round marks a deliberate expansion beyond the fund’s traditional sub-Saharan focus into MENA cross-border commerce. Mobola da Silva of Capria Ventures described the opportunity in structural terms: unreliable delivery and constrained working capital have historically kept millions of SMEs out of e-commerce entirely. An integrated solution that makes those processes “predictable and scalable,” she argued, would move Flextock from service provider to market infrastructure.
MSA Capital’s re-entry fits a pattern the firm has pursued elsewhere on the continent — backing logistics and enablement plays that sit beneath the consumer layer and are less exposed to the governance risks that brought down Capiter. Its earlier Egyptian bets, including SWVL and Rabbit, were also in mobility and quick-commerce — sectors that proved difficult to sustain at scale in the face of Egypt’s currency devaluations and rising operational costs.
A Market Still Finding Its Footing
Egypt’s startup ecosystem is, by regional standards, large and active. But the Capiter episode exposed real vulnerabilities: inadequate board governance, insufficient financial controls, and a fundraising environment that rewarded growth narratives over unit economics.
MSA’s return does not resolve those structural issues. But it does suggest that at least some global investors have concluded that the market correction of 2022 and 2023 has run its course — and that the next wave of Egyptian companies, building on more disciplined foundations, represents a credible opportunity.
For Flextock, the endorsement matters. Having a Chinese institutional investor with cross-continental reach on the cap table, alongside established Africa-focused VCs, positions the company to access networks and capital structures that Egypt-only investors cannot provide.
Whether MSA’s re-engagement deepens — particularly if the $1 billion MENA pre-IPO fund moves forward — will be watched closely by founders and funds alike. The firm’s history in Egypt is complicated. Its return, cautious as it appears, suggests the story is not over.