Egyptian waste technology startup Bekia has raised $765,000 in seed funding to expand its enterprise software offerings and digitize North Africa’s fragmented recycling supply chain.
The round was led by Madica, an Africa-focused venture program affiliated with Flourish Ventures, with follow-on participation from pan-African climate investor Catalyst Fund and Dakar-headquartered Jambaar Capital.
The capital injection comes amid heightened regulatory focus on waste management in Egypt. The country produces approximately 60,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste daily, the vast majority of which is routed to unmanaged open landfills. Under national environmental targets, Cairo is seeking to lift its municipal recycling rate from roughly 37 per cent in 2024 to 60 per cent by 2027. Meeting that objective requires formalizing a trade currently dominated by informal collectors operating without contracts, licensing, or standardized record-keeping.
Founded in 2019 by Cairo University computer science graduate Alaa Afifi, Bekia initially built a consumer-facing platform that allowed households to book waste pickups, weigh materials at set benchmark rates, and receive digital payments. The business has since evolved into an intermediary technology layer connecting informal collectors, domestic households, and industrial recycling plants.
“Egypt’s recycling sector has always functioned, but it operated entirely on cash and informal trust without a central registry,” said Alaa Afifi, founder and chief executive of Bekia. “While recyclable material itself is a standard commodity, the data surrounding its provenance and carbon footprint is not. Owning that transaction record is where the enterprise value sits.”
At the end of October, Bekia plans to launch Bekia Next, its first business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service product. The software aggregates collection data to generate audited CO₂-avoidance reporting for corporate clients, responding to stricter Scope 3 reporting obligations imposed on multinationals operating across the region.
Bekia reports diverting more than 25,000 tonnes of waste from landfills to date, integrating over 2,400 independent collectors into its system and serving 100,000 retail clients — 97 per cent of whom are women. The company claims a sevenfold increase in platform throughput since 2023, supported by enterprise retention rates above 95 per cent. Monetization relies on corporate waste management contracts, transaction margins on material sales, and a refurbished electronics vertical introduced in June 2026.
Venture interest in North African climate technology has increasingly shifted toward software-driven supply chain tracking rather than capital-intensive processing infrastructure. Investors view Bekia’s model as a test case for whether informal waste markets in emerging economies can be successfully organized through digital transaction data.
Bekia plans to use the seed capital to expand its core engineering team, scale the B2B subscription business, and conduct initial market testing in a second African jurisdiction.