EGYPT – Amenli, an Egypt-based startup backed by Y Combinator and the first Egyptian online insurance firm to be issued an insurance license, has raised US$2.3 million in a seed round to provide insurance services to Egyptians.
The new money will be used to grow the company’s personnel, scale quickly, and attract more clients in a market that is predicted to develop at a CAGR of 7% per year over the next five years.
Amenli was formed in 2020 by Adham Nauman and Shady El Tohfa to solve Egypt’s $2 billion underserved insurance market.
The startup makes its users’ lives easier. Users only have to answer a few questions when they first log onto the Amenli platform.
What insurance policies will be proposed to them will be determined on the answers they provide. Amenli has its own infrastructure, offers APIs to other insurers, and its methodology gives rapid quotes.
“Right now, we are still trying to prove that there is demand in the market for selling insurance because there was no benchmark and we did not know if people would receive the insurance online,” said co-founder and CEO Shady El Tohfa.
“Everyone would say that in Egypt, people do not want to understand or buy insurance. But what we found is that educated people in the middle-income segment are aware of insurance, understand it and want to buy it, even though it wasn’t accessible to them before.”
Before creating Amenli, El Tohfa and Nauman were members of the founding team of Paymob, an Egyptian fintech startup. In 2017, they also worked on a microfinance program, which introduced them to the concept of insurance for the first time.
Their continued research and enthusiasm in the business encouraged them to pursue insurtech full-time. El Tohfa, on the other hand, first began looking at market potential as a result of a series of personal events.
Several local and international firms participated in the round, including co-lead investors P1 Ventures, GFC, and Anim Fund (Founders Fund scout fund), as well as Costanoa VC, Liquid2 Ventures, Cliff Angels, and other angel investors.
Based in New York, P1 Ventures has actively been investing in the African startup space, investing notably in Kenyan HR startup WorkPay, Nigeria’s OnePipe; Kenya’s Lami Technologies and MarketForce; Nigeria’s VertoFX; Egypt’s Yodawy, among others.
Berlin, Germany-based Global Founders Capital, has invested in notable startups such as LinkedIn, DeliveryHero, Facebook, Slack. The fund is sector-agnostic.
The investment in Egypt’s first digital bank, Telda, in May this year is the first investment in any Egyptian startup for Global Founders Capital.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Costanoa Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in b2b startups.
On the other hand, Liquid 2 Ventures is a San Francisco-based VC that provides technology startups with seed-stage investments. The investor had previously invested in one of Africa’s newest unicorns Chipper Cash.
Considerable traction and backing from Y Combinator. Amenli was a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2021 program and has progressed rapidly since then. Amenli’s revenue has tripled since graduating from the accelerator, according to Shady El Tohfa, a co-founder at the startup.
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