Egyptian fintech startup Dayra has won a $15,000 equity-free grant from Y Combinator’s Startup School. Dayra is one of the grant winners announced by Y Combinator last week Friday. In fact, it is the only African startup to win the grant.
Founded this year by Hesham Ghandour, Mohammed Ennabah, Abdelrahman Rizq, Dayra is an app that is used to send money from your bank account to anyone in Egypt with a phone number.
Set up by Y Combinator, Startup School is a free online course for founders actively pursuing their own startup. Throughout the school curriculum, Y Combinator aims to accomplish the following:
- Encourage and inspire people to consider starting a company as a way to positively impact the world.
- Teach people how to start a startup, and equip them with the resources and tools to help prepare them now and in the future.
- Build a community of entrepreneurs who can encourage, teach and support one another.
The program is free and available to anyone but at the end of it, Y Combinator selects some startups that completed the online course to reward them with a grant. Last year, the grant was $10,000 but it was $15,000 in 2019.
In the 2019 edition, over 40,000 founders participated in the program and a little over 10,000 graduated from it.
According to Hesham in a discussion with MENAbytes about winning the grant, “The YC grant is nice of course. It’s not about the money though. The amount is too small to make a huge difference. But it has given us a nice boost of confidence. The most important thing, however, is that users really want what we are building. That remains our biggest motivation.”
