Beltone Holding has launched a dedicated private equity platform, broadening its investment capabilities to cover the full funding lifecycle from pre-seed through to pre-IPO. The move signals a deliberate shift in how one of Egypt’s most prominent financial groups wants to be perceived — less as a brokerage house, more as an end-to-end capital partner for high-growth companies across the region.

The new platform is designed to address a persistent structural gap in the MENA investment ecosystem: the so-called “growth-stage valley of death,” where companies that have outgrown venture capital struggle to attract larger institutional backers before they are ready for public markets. By creating a bridge between its existing venture capital arm, Beltone Venture Capital (BVC), and institutional-scale investment, Beltone is betting it can retain portfolio relationships — and capture more of the value — as those companies scale.

Building on the VC Foundation

The private equity arm is not being built from scratch. It sits on top of BVC’s track record, which, by 2024, had established the firm as one of the more active early-stage investors operating on the African continent. The portfolio includes logistics startup Trella and healthcare platform Grinta, among others — companies that sit squarely in the logistics and fintech sectors Beltone has consistently backed.

Leading the new platform is Ali Mokhtar, who will carry his dual title of CEO and Managing Partner across both the VC and PE vehicles. The decision to keep leadership unified is deliberate: Beltone says the goal is continuity — of capital, of governance frameworks, and of the relationships that have been built over years of early-stage investing.

“The launch of the private equity platform represents an advanced stage in the development of the group’s investment system,” the company said in a statement, describing it as a progression rather than a pivot.

For Mokhtar, the mandate will be to take companies that BVC has already identified, backed, and supported, and ensure they have access to larger cheques at the growth stage — without forcing founders to go abroad for Series C and beyond.

Why Now?

The timing is not incidental. Egypt’s startup ecosystem has matured considerably over the past four years, and a cohort of VC-backed companies is beginning to reach the inflection point where they need growth capital — typically in the $10–50 million range — that domestic markets have historically struggled to provide.

At the same time, the broader MENA region is seeing a narrowing of the gap between venture and private equity. Gulf-based sovereign funds have become more active at the growth stage, and pan-African platforms are increasingly competing with traditional PE houses for deals that previously would have flowed automatically to London or Paris.

For Beltone, launching now also fits neatly into a wider repositioning that has been underway for at least 18 months. The group has moved aggressively to transform itself from a conventional Egyptian brokerage and asset manager into something that more closely resembles a technology-led financial conglomerate — one with ambitions that stretch well beyond the Cairo Stock Exchange.

Beltone’s PE launch comes just weeks after the company completed the most significant deal in its recent history: the €197.6 million (approximately $235.9 million) acquisition of Baobab Group, a microfinance and digital lending platform operating across seven Sub-Saharan African markets, including Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Madagascar.

The deal, executed through Beltone Capital, gave the group an immediate cross-border footprint and a loan book of €848.8 million serving 1.6 million clients. It also represented the full exit of previous majority shareholders, including UK-based private equity firm Apis Partners and Abler Nordic.

The Investment Thesis in Full

Taken together, Beltone wants to be the investor of first resort for founders in Egypt and the wider MENA region, and it wants to follow those founders — and their capital requirements — all the way to the point of institutional scale or public market readiness.

The private equity platform adds the missing middle layer. It means a startup that takes a seed cheque from BVC, raises a Series A, and then needs $20–30 million to expand into West Africa could theoretically do so with Beltone writing a significant portion of that round — drawing on relationships across a portfolio that now spans microfinance infrastructure in seven countries.

Beltone’s moves reflect something larger happening across the Egyptian technology and finance landscape. As domestic market dynamics mature and early-stage capital becomes more abundant, the next competitive frontier is the growth stage — and, increasingly, the geographic expansion that accompanies it.

Egyptian firms are looking south with growing confidence. The North-to-Sub-Saharan corridor that the Baobab deal now represents is likely to attract more entrants. For Beltone, moving early — and moving with both a platform investment and an in-house PE vehicle — is an attempt to establish a structural advantage in that corridor before the competition intensifies.

Whether the private equity arm becomes a genuine institutional player or remains a complementary piece of the BVC infrastructure will become clearer over the next 18 to 24 months, as the platform announces its first growth-stage deals. 

For now, the message Beltone is sending to the market is deliberate and legible: it intends to be present at every stage of a company’s capital journey, and it has built — or bought — the infrastructure to make that case credibly.