Egyptian MoneyHash raises $3m in pre-seed funding to build super-API for MEA

MoneyHash, an Egyptian Fintech startup, announced that it has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding to build a super-API for payment operations in Middle East and Africa (MEA).

This is in fact an extension of an undisclosed pre-seed investment announced in June 2021 led by Amir Farha’s COTU Ventures. COTU Ventures also led this extension, with participation from previous investors in the initial pre-seed round and and others like VentureSouq, VentureFriends, The Continent Venture Partners, Nuwa Capital and First Check Africa. There were also some Angel investors involved this time – NerdWallet’s Tim Chen, Jake Gibson and Belvo’s Oriol Tintore.

Founded in 2020 by Nader Abdelrazik, Mustafa Eid, and Anisha Sekar, MoneyHash is aspiring to be the go-to infrastructure of revenue operations in emerging markets. They empower businesses with the tools and microservices to connect with providers, build features, and centralize reporting with no code or hectic operations.

The company describes itself as the Middle East and Africa’s “first super-API for payment orchestration and revenue operations.”

According to CEO Abdelrazik, “The idea of the super-API is that you consolidate the different payment accounts and build all of these features on top of it. MoneyHash becomes this one-stop-shop product, or payments stack that you put in your product and manage all of these different integrations and checkout experience in each of the African and Middle Eastern countries and have all your information on one dashboard.

Apart from building the API, MoneyHash intends to hire more people, primarily mid-level and senior software engineers, currently 15 across the U.S., Egypt, the UAE, Nigeria and some parts of Europe.

MoneyHash started with 17 companies using its sandbox environment to connect with its API and access payments gateways such as Fawry, Paymob and PayTabs. Post beta, MoneyHash will plug into other payments gateways and processors, including Checkout, Stripe, Ayden, Amazon Pay, Tap and ValU.

Five of the companies using its sandbox environment are now active and paying customers, paying between $150 and $1,000 per month, depending on the number of payment providers they connect to. MoneyHash also charges transaction fees that start at 10 cents and go down as payments volume increases.

MoneyHash has clients across several industries including e-commerce, travel and tourism, and remittances.

MoneyHash clients cut across different industries: e-commerce, travel and tourism, and remittances, among others. They can integrate payment providers with a few clicks, embed a unified checkout system, and access micro-services such as transaction routing, subscription management and invoicing on the platform.

Amir Farha, founder of lead investor COTU Ventures, had this to say about the investment, “MoneyHash is led by three remarkable founders with deep knowledge of payments and acumen for product-led execution. They are attracting a great team of talent, and after their impressive beta run, their product is ready for prime time. We are excited to be part of their journey.”