Cairo-based startup Fincart has closed a seed funding round that it said exceeded its $2.8m target, as the company seeks to expand its AI-powered operating system for online merchants across the Middle East and Africa.
The round was co-led by Africa-focused fund Launch Africa and early-stage investor Antler MENAP. Participants included Yango Ventures, Five35 Ventures, Bluestream Capital, Hi2 Global, Kalahari Venture Labs and several other investors active in the region. The capital injection follows a pre-seed round led by Plus VC, with backing from Orbit Ventures, Plug and Play and local investors.
Founded by Mostafa El Masry and Nihal Ali, former executives at Careem, Glovo, Vodafone and Delivery Hero, Fincart began as a platform connecting e-commerce sellers with last-mile delivery providers to improve delivery performance and speed up cash-on-delivery settlements. It has since evolved into a broader operating system that integrates shipping, short-term revenue-based financing and customer-retention tools driven by artificial intelligence agents.
The platform aggregates more than 40 shipping companies — a network the company describes as the largest integrated delivery network of its kind in Africa — and automates the entire order-to-cash workflow. Merchants can manage shipments, reconcile cash-on-delivery payments and access working capital advances linked to sales volumes from a single dashboard.
According to the company, over 450 merchants across fashion, cosmetics, accessories and electronics now use Fincart. It reports that nearly 40 per cent of new customers arrive through direct referrals, and that it has spent no budget on marketing over the past three years. It also says the platform has processed goods with a total value exceeding E£1bn (approximately $20m), removing manual order handling and the fragmented payment collection that remains a persistent friction in markets dominated by cash on delivery.
“Everything we build starts with sitting down with merchants and understanding where they are losing time, money or customers,” said Nihal Ali, co-founder and chief operating officer. “Most of them use five or six separate tools to manage shipping, payments and customer interaction, and these tools do not integrate with each other. We built Fincart to replace all of that with a single dashboard.”
The company intends to use the new funding to grow its commercial and technical teams, invest in product development and form new business partnerships in Egypt. It also plans to enter additional markets during 2027, a step it says will cement its position as a regional operating system for e-commerce merchants.
“E-commerce in Egypt and the Mena region doesn’t grow thanks to a single company, but rather when merchants, shipping companies and the platforms that connect them all improve their performance,” El Masry said. “This investment will enable us to expand partnerships, develop our AI-powered platform, enhance infrastructure and accelerate growth in Africa and the Middle East.”
The funding announcement underscores investor appetite for digital infrastructure serving small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses in Egypt, where cash on delivery remains the dominant payment method and operational complexity is a brake on growth.
“The Egyptian e-commerce market represents one of the most significant investment opportunities in digital infrastructure in Africa, given its large market size, the dominance of cash on delivery and the continued lack of services geared towards SMEs,” said Lina Kassim, investment director at Launch Africa. “The founders have built an indispensable platform for merchants, and their organic, referral-driven growth demonstrates product-market fit.”
Roman Assunção, managing partner at Antler MENAP, said the decision to back Fincart rested heavily on the team. “We invest in people first, and Mostafa, Nihal and their team were the main reason behind our decision,” he said. “They experienced this problem from all angles and built the company quickly and with discipline. We believe in Egypt’s potential as a launchpad for trade infrastructure in the Middle East and Africa.”
While the company’s metrics remain modest relative to the size of Egypt’s e-commerce market — estimated at several billion dollars annually — the reliance on referrals and the absence of marketing spend suggest a product closely aligned with the day-to-day needs of merchants. As Fincart prepares to expand beyond its home market, the test will be whether a platform forged in Egypt’s cash-on-delivery environment can be adapted to the diverse logistics and payment landscapes elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East.