Meet Africa's latest Unicorn 🦄 👋🏾

Welcome to Tech Safari!

Your tour guide on African Tech 🧭

Today is Tech Roundup Tuesday, where we will dive into the biggest stories in the world's most exciting continent.

Hello to the 239 new folks who have joined the Safari since Saturday! If you haven't subscribed, join 3,567 smart folks curious about Tech in Africa.

Tomorrow (or later today, depending on where you are) we're hosting a spaces event on Investing in Africa!

Featuring Joe Kinvi (Co-Founder of HoaQ Club), Boum III Jr (CEO of Daba Finance) and Eric Jackson (Co-Founder of Hisa). Sign up here.

Okay! here is the tour plan for today 🧭

• Meet Africa's latest Unicorn 🦄

• Tech Roundup

• Tech Twitter

Let's get this tour started  🦍

Meet Africa's latest Unicorn 🦄

Say hello to Africa’s latest unicorn, MNT-Halan, joining Africa's exclusive $1 billion dollar club.

Hailing from Egypt, it's the country's second unicorn and Africa's 9th to date.

It breaks Africa’s unicorn drought of 2022 - but more importantly, the round sees a new player in African VC enter the arena.

MNT-Halan is a self-described ‘super app that banks the unbanked.’

With 5 million users across Egypt, and offering services like loans, payments and e-commerce - it seems like a familiar, plain African fintech success story.

But that’s not how it started.

MNT-Halan was once just Halan - until meeting MNT Investments.

Putting the MNT in Halan

Halan is Arabic for ‘immediately.’

And, fitting with the name, Halan began as a ride-hailing app back in 2018.

Co-Founder of Halan, Mounir Nakhla spent time with the founder Gojek - Nadiem Makarim.

Gojek began as a ride-hailing app in Indonesia before expanding to services like payments and e-commerce - quickly becoming Indonesia’s first Unicorn.

Now Gojek is a super app worth over $10 billion.

On the flight back from meeting Makarim (Gojek’s founder) Nakhla found ‘the growth possibilities with technology eye-opening’ and decided to start Halan.

Using Gojek's playbook, Halan was built affordable transport for Egypt’s underserved communities at a low price.

And as a ride-hailing app, Halan raised 8 million in funding from local VCs like Algebra Ventures, Singaporean firm Battery Road Digital and Uber’s co-founder and CTO, Oscar Salazar.

But a few years into building Halan for transport, other products - like digital wallets, e-commerce, bill payments and consumer loans - became features of the app.

And by 2021, fintech had taken centre stage for Halan.

Naklha saw more opportunity in building for Egypt’s financial sector - which he saw as ‘the backbone of the economy.’

That year, Halan merged with a Dutch micro-lending platform called MNT Investments to turbocharge their lending technology and become the company we know today - MNT-Halan.

MNT-Halan Today - Banking Egypt’s Unbanked

Egypt is one of Africa’s biggest countries with a population of over 100 million but two in every three adults in Egypt are unbanked.

While it’s difficult for Egypt’s unbanked to access traditional financial services, MNT-Halan has built a super app for businesses and individuals around three pillars:

• Lending - through micro-financing, Buy Now Pay Later, business lending and payroll lending. They have lent over $2 Billion to date.

• Payments - Peer-to-peer transfers, bill payments, payroll disbursements and virtual cards.

• E-commerce - a customer-facing e-commerce store for appliances and electronics, and a business-facing store for merchants.

MNT-Halan has focused on building a digital ecosystem. This means adding more and more products and services to their app.

Their playbook is acquiring other companies that can fit into their super app to increase the lifetime value of their customers.

Now, MTN-Halan has 5 million customers using the platform with 1.3 million using the platform each month - putting the super in super app.

And when they raised their latest round, they had reached 300 million in revenue.

A sign of capital to come

Looking at where MNT-Halan’s funding came from, it seems like there is a whole lot more that Egyptian startups can expect this year.

While most unicorn-making rounds have been led by US funds like Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital and Avenir Growth Capital - or from SoftBank Investment Advisers - this round saw another player enter the arena.

MNT-Halan raised $260 million in equity with most of this funded by Chimera Capital - a $10 billion venture capital fund from the United Arab Emirates.

Chimera Capital purchased a 20% stake in MNT-Halan for $200 million. It also participated in Tunisian startup InstaDeep Ltd's Series B in 2022.

And it’s not the only firm from the Gulf Region making moves in Africa.

As Damilare from Tech Cabal points out, funds from the Gulf Region (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) control an enormous amount of wealth.

And firms from the Gulf Region are showing promising signs.

Last year, Saudi Arabia’s $620 billion Sovereign Wealth Fund started a company that will invest in startups in Egypt.

ADQ, an Abu Dhabi-based investment company, has also set up shop in Egypt with a $10 billion fund.

Egypt’s country director of VC firm Plug and Play, saw this as a big opportunity for newly established funds getting investors, and for growth-stage companies in Egypt - as we have seen with MTN-Halan.

Following the run-up of African tech giants in the last five years, MTN-Halan is Africa’s latest unicorn.

And it shows that the Gulf Region is finally looking at African tech.

Could MNT-Halan just be the start of their African Tech funding spree?

Let me know what you think here

Tech Roundup

• Kenya drops its charges of financial impropriety against Flutterwave. In July 2022, Kenya froze 6.2 billion shillings held by the fintech on suspicion of card fraud and money laundering.

• Pick n Pay (South African retail giant) now accepts Bitcoin in more than 1500 of its stores as a form of payment.

• Starlink is officially active in Nigeria - making it the first African country to offer Elon Musk’s spaceX internet service.

Tech Twitter

PS - if you haven't already, sign up to attend our discussion on Investing on African Tech on Twitter Spaces tomorrow/later today. Set a reminder to attend here.

And that's a wrap!

Did we miss anything? Or just want to say hey?  Hit reply - I'd love to hear from you! You can

• 🐦 Find me on Twitter

• 💬 Holler on Linkedin

• 💌 Email (Reply to this email)

• 🚀 Sponsor Tech Safari (Reply to this email)

And if you don't already, make sure to sign up to get this in your inbox next week

Catch you soon!

👋🏾 Caleb