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Wednesday, 30 March 2022

Robo-advisory firm Xpovi scaling up after pre-seed round + Kenya’s Churpy is eyeing Egypt

As folks who are building businesses ourselves, we have a particular fondness of startups that solve non-payments-related problems for people who are starting businesses — or running existing companies. We have news of three such companies today.

Robo-advisory startup Xpovi is deploying proceeds from its USD 300k pre-seed round led by angel investors to scale up its services. The funding has allowed it to grow its team and launch the country’s first “automated business planning web application,” CEO Mohamed Marei said in a release (pdf). Xpovi is now focused on its “data-automation, artificial intelligence, and user experience” as it targets a potential market of c. 4 mn Egyptian MSMEs.

What does Xpovi do? The company, founded in spring 2021, allows startup founders to build business plans by filling out an online questionnaire — taking delivery of their plan the same day. It says it relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning automate the process of data sorting automation and building financial models.

MEANWHILE- Kenyan fintech startup Churpy eyes Egypt: The account receivables automation startup wants to expand to Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa after securing USD 1 mn in seed funding (TechCrunch)

AND- New open-finance platform for MSMEs: E-payment companies Damen and CashCall, along with private equity player Aur Fintech have set up Madad, a new open-finance platform to provide Egyptian micro-merchants with non-banking financial services, according to a statement (pdf). Madad is looking to serve a network of 100k merchants to provide “various types of lending systems [and] working capital schemes,” among other products.

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