Elves, an Egyptian-app-based concierge service, has raised $2 million from venture capital firm, Sawari Ventures, and its existing investors.
A part of the investment was raised in February earlier this year and another in July. Sawari invested in both the transactions.
The new investment takes Elves’ total raised to date to $5 million, said the startup. Elves had raised $2 million in December 2017 from Emaar, Kauffman Fellows Syndicate, and Dubai Angel
Founded in 2017 by Karim Elsahy and Abeer Elsisi, Elves offers different on-demand services, through its AI-powered concierge app.
The app enables users to chat with an elf (a term it uses for its human assistants) to help them buy stuff (online or offline), book flights or hotels, pay bills, or even get some very customized requests addressed (e.g. arranging a car with flowers in it).
Most of the offline services that Elves offers are only available for users in Egypt but anything that’s online is being offered to users all around the world.
Elves had started as a service on Facebook Messenger where users could chat with an elf to get things done but have now evolved to offer this through its own dedicated app.
The startup has had an app for years but it launched a revamped version earlier this year and now over 90 percent of the total usage comes from the app, its co-founder and CEO told MENAbytes.
Karim in a statement said that they had to make some hard and fast decisions after Covid-19, “A large part of our revenue was coming from flight bookings, hotel reservations, concerts, cinema tickets, and those industries were basically shut down.
“We shifted rapidly to a focus on what people would need most while they were confined to their homes and drilled down on that. Groceries has become very big for us so we’ve automated it, signed up more than 40 grocery partners, jam-packed it with exclusive deals and we’re going in a big way.”
“They’ve successfully demonstrated how previous user requests can be reused to serve similar live requests thus raising the number of live concurrent users each human operator can handle. They are, in essence, generating “Alexa Skills” at a pace of tens of thousands a month through millions of live human conversations,” added the statement.
Wael Amin, Partner at Sawari Ventures, commenting on the investment, said, “What initially attracted us to Elves was its unique combination of AI and human concierge capabilities, giving it superior versatility and scalability over its competitors. The onset of Covid, and the company’s ability to quickly adapt to changing consumer behavior and scale to meet the surge in demand further reaffirmed our belief in the model, and led us to double down on our initial investment.”
