Accel has invested in more than 200 startups in the region to date, making it one of the more prolific VCs in this market.
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Cards are gaining ground in Egypt, with over 30 million in circulation (prepaid cards, particularly, are seeing more use than debit and credit cards combined). This surge in card usage, about 14% in the last four years, is primarily due to the incentives introduced by fintech companies and banks, attracting millions of Egyptian consumers who previously relied mainly on cash for their transactions.
The adoption of corporate cards tells a different tale. Businesses of all sizes have hesitated to embrace corporate cards because of limited access and inadequate spending controls over their usage.
Traditionally, banks have been the primary providers of corporate cards across the country; however, fintech companies are now entering the scene to boost adoption. Swypex, one such fintech that’s offering corporate cards and management tools for businesses, raised $4 million, which it will use to expand its business and technical capabilities of its platform.
Image Credits: Swypex
Around 3.8 million businesses in Egypt face challenges with complicated and rigid financial systems, according to a UNDP report. Like many across Africa, these businesses are using multiple disconnected methods to handle their finances, causing inefficiencies. Employee fraud is also a problem, with businesses losing an average of 5% of their revenues yearly to fraudulent activities that often arise from cash transactions like asset misappropriation and financial misreporting.
Yet, there are significant tailwinds from a regulatory perspective; for instance, Egypt’s apex bank, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), launched initiatives such as the Instant Payment Network (IPN) to reduce cash-based transactions and encourage digital payments.
Several fintechs in Egypt, including Swypex, are leveraging such initiatives to launch necessary financial services while adhering to the central bank’s guidelines. CEO Ahmad Mokhtar explained that the startup, founded in early 2022 but only emerging from stealth mode now, dedicated its first year to acquiring essential licenses, ensuring regulatory compliance, and collaborating with payment processors and bank sponsors. Swypex then rolled out the beta version to 100 customers last December.
“We spoke to hundreds of different businesses, from startups to SMEs to large corporations, enterprises, and publicly listed companies, to understand what their challenges were at different stages,” said Mokhtar, who launched the startup with Tarek Mokhtar (CPO) and Sasan Hezarkhani (CTO), on the problem Swypex is tackling. “We realized there were specific pains shared that haven’t been met for the last decade or two, like businesses predominantly using cash and losing visibility over their money or using banking services that were a little bit archaic, so they had to visit the banks a lot to sign physical papers and documents to get things moving for their businesses.”
Mokhtar said Swypex provides businesses with an “unlimited” number of corporate cards for their employees. The platform enables these businesses to set smart controls to manage spending, such as setting different limits and specifying usage permissions for ATM withdrawals and online transactions. After transactions, employees can upload receipts, invoices and spending details, which are consolidated into a centralized dashboard with integrated data from the government’s e-invoicing platform. In addition to ERP and accounting software integrations, Swypex offers businesses a streamlined and comprehensive overview of all expenses and spending in a single location.
“Businesses using our platform can see analytics around the distribution of spend on each department, merchant, individual and category level,” said Tarek Mokhtar, the company’s chief product officer.“We also categorize all the expenses on the platform to give profound insight into a business’s financial health and each line item, which will help businesses make more data-driven decisions based on the real-time visibility we provide them with.”
Swypex’s competition in the corporate card space across Africa includes YC-backed companies like Boya and Bujeti. In Egypt, it’s banks such as HSBC and National Bank. Mokhtar argues that Swypex is a better option for businesses because it allows for more customization in its offerings and provides a broader range of features and services, including unlimited card issuance and advanced controls. “Our focus on things like user experience and instant controls over these cards like blocking them, and having all of that automation built in, is fundamentally new to the market,” the CEO said.
The 2-year-old all-in-one financial management platform, which offers businesses its first three cards for free, generates revenue from interchange fees, floats and FX markups.
Accel, the storied venture capital firm making its first investment across the MENA region (though it has backed an African money transfer app), led the $4 million seed round in Swypex. Investors who participated in the round included Foundation Ventures, The Raba Partnership, and other angel investors.
It’s significant for a startup just emerging from beta only after a few months, especially in a challenging funding climate where traction and revenue are priorities. But there are good reasons why it attracted investment even before its official launch: Swypex’s potential to address a sizable market (it’s targeting a portion of the card and payments market worth over $10 billion and expected to grow at a 10% CAGR over the next three years), as highlighted by Mokhtar, along with the founders’ backgrounds in developing products at scale for global companies like Twitter, PlayStation and Spotify.
“As the payments space continues to digitize, the opportunity to provide modern fintech products to Egyptian businesses has become even more important,” said Richard Kotite, vice president at Accel, in a statement. “Ahmad, Tarek and Sasan have spotted a gap in the market for a comprehensive B2B solution that addresses many of the key pain points businesses regularly face while driving a step-change in efficiency. We see a real opportunity for Swypex to become a fintech champion across the Middle East. The team is technically experienced and highly ambitious, and we are delighted to be joining them on this journey.”
Swiggy plans to raise $1.25 billion in an initial public offering and has secured approval from its shareholders, the Indian food delivery and instant commerce startup disclosed in a filing to the local regulator.
The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, which competes with publicly-listed Zomato and StepStone Group-backed Zepto, plans to raise $450 million through issuance of new shares and offer $800 million of shares from existing backers in the IPO, it wrote in a filing to Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
The Indian startup ecosystem has been eagerly anticipating Swiggy’s public debut, which is slated for later this year. Swiggy counts Prosus, Accel, SoftBank and Invesco among its backers. It was last valued at $10.7 billion in a funding round unveiled in early 2022. Some of its investors, including Invesco and Baron, have since publicly marked up the valuation of Swiggy to over $12 billion.
Swiggy had earlier intended to go public in 2023, TechCrunch previously reported, but deferred the plan due to not-so-favorable market conditions.
This is a developing story. More to follow.
Automation continues to be a major theme in the enterprise — underscored not least by the rise of AI as a tool to help fix some of the more routine, resource-intensive and fragmented aspects of how security and other IT functions operate. To capitalize on that trend, one of the bigger startups in the space, the Dublin-founded Tines, is announcing $50 million in funding. Tines started with its roots in security workflow automation but has seen adoption across other parts of the IT landscape. Now, on the back of revenues growing 200% in the last 18 months, it plans to use the new capital to expand its automation platform play deeper into applications in infrastructure, engineering and product.
The funding — co-led by existing investors Accel and Felicis — is being described as an extension of the company’s Series B rather than a Series C.
“We weren’t proactively trying to raise and were focused on building the business,” Tines’ CEO and co-founder Eoin Hinchy said in an interview. “Our existing investors saw our execution and approached us. We went from discussing what a round could look like to it being wrapped up in a couple of weeks.” He confirmed that it is not profitable currently by choice, to focus on growth.
This actually makes this the second extension to Tines’ Series B in three years, with the original round appearing in 2021 (at $26 million), and the first extension coming in October 2022 ($55 million).
But it’s not without a valuation bump. Hinchy declined to disclose the numbers but other sources close to the company confirmed it’s now valued post-money at close to $600 million. (As a point of comparison, PitchBook data notes that it was valued at $423 million at the first extension.) Others in this round include Addition, strategic backer CrowdStrike Falcon Fund and SVCI — all existing investors in Tines.
It has now raised some $146.2 million in total.
As we have previously described, the gap in the market that Tines is targeting comes from Hinchy’s and his co-founder Thomas Kinsella’s own direct experience. Hinchy is a classic technical founder. He and Kinsella (now chief customer officer) both spent around a decade working in leading roles in cybersecurity for companies like DocuSign, eBay and Deloitte, where they found major gaps in the market for tools to help better manage the large number of services they used to track data and network activity for his companies.
All of that was compounded by not just the explosion of new cybersecurity techniques but also hacking risks that grew out of the rise of cloud computing and related innovations. Hinchy estimated to me that the average security team manages some 77 different products, with “some in the hundreds.”
“By 2017 we desperately needed a workflow automation tool, and really nothing out there came close to what we wanted, so we decided to build what we wish we had,” Hinchy said. Tines covers what he describes as “mission critical workflows” which in security include tools to monitor and track security alerts, compliance alerts and increasingly areas that are adjacent to where security teams need to have visibility such as employee onboarding and offboarding, patch management in IT and more.
“We are the plumbing between these systems,” he said.
Although Hinchy is technical himself, he saw that another gap was that a lot of the need for monitoring was best served by not having to be a technical solution in itself. The whole of Tines is conceptualized in a drag-and-drop, no-code framework, building blocks that aim to reduce the amount of time it takes to create and manage workflows on the platform.
That is where the opportunity lies also for Tines’ investors. Although there are definite and very large competitors in the market including Splunk (and now Cisco by virtue of having acquired Splunk this year), Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow and Microsoft, Tines and its backers and its users would contend that their focused and more context-aware approach are more useful and effective.
“Customer satisfaction is typically abysmally low in security,” Jake Storm, the partner at Felicis who led the deal, said in an interview. He said that he was surprised, when making due diligence calls when weighing up this latest deal, how different that was for Tines. “That’s just unheard of. It was just glaringly obvious that Tines was years ahead of its competitors back in 2022 and we just feel that gap has continued to widen.”
Luca Bocchio at Accel sees workflow as the key missing link, one that gives Tines a lot of potential to position itself further as a platform, not a service.
“If anything over the last few years, the growth of security needs has led to more security products and tools and that boils down to more workflow needs. That means Tines is becoming more relevant. With security being part of broader IT and business operations, it naturally needs to engage with the rest of the organization.”
Application programming interfaces, or APIs as they’re commonly known, are the bedrock of everything we do online. APIs allow two things on the internet to talk with each other, including connected devices or phone apps.
But the enormous growth of API usage — around half of all internet traffic — is putting businesses’ data at risk. A common security risk is granting third parties overly permissive API access. Malicious hackers can leverage APIs to gain access to a company’s sensitive information.
Cybersecurity startup Vorlon says it helps businesses protect their data from such incidents using its platform, and raised $15.7 million to improve its technology.
Founded in 2022 by former Palo Alto Networks executives Amir Khayat and Amichay Spivak, Vorlon analyzes network traffic to detect and remediate potential API abuse in real-time.
In an interview, Khayat said the company’s technology runs the analysis and lets the customer know “something that you need to be notified about and take an action on.”
Vorlon continuously observes a company’s APIs and notifies them when vendors make updates helps to better understand their exposure or potential exposure Khayat told TechCrunch. The founder also noted that alongside detecting vulnerabilities and exposures, Vorlon’s platform looks at the type of data third-party APIs have access to and where that can be connected to other applications.
Vorlon uses AI to analyze and map all the API communication it monitors and translate it into human-readable language. This helps users get a summary of their third-party apps. Vorlon also provides an AI chatbot to let businesses search for information in human natural language about any security threats or issues they have. Khayat said Vorlon doesn’t send chatbot data anywhere; instead, it sends user queries to its own databases, and the chatbot will return the information from the startup’s database.
“In many cases, organizations won’t find out about a vendor’s data breach until months after the fact,” said Steve Loughlin, Partner at Accel, in a statement. “Vorlon’s ability to reduce the timeline between threat detection and remediation to minutes is what makes this technology so powerful.”
Vorlon counts Hubspot, SafeBreach and presales engineering platform Vivun among early customers since the launch of its platform in February. The company says it sees significant demand from the healthcare and financial sectors and targets enterprises with at least 1,500 employees.
The Delaware-based startup, with an R&D subsidiary in Tel Aviv, currently has around 22 employees, and plans to increase that number by adding more people to its sales and product R&D teams using the money from its Series A round, which was led by Accel.
The all-equity round saw participation from Shield Capital and cybersecurity angel investors, including Demisto co-founders Slavik Markovich, Rishi Bhargava, Dan Sarel and Guy Rinat, who worked closely with Vorlon’s co-founders at Demisto before Palo Alto Networks acquired it in 2019. Former Exabeam CEO Nir Polak and Fox Corporation CTO Paul Cheesborough are also key Vorlon investors.
Sprinto, a security compliance and risk platform, has raised a $20 million Series B round to build more automation into its compliance management platform and widen its customer base to include the wide gamut of companies that operate digitally but aren’t tech-first.
Compliance with frameworks such as SOC 2, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ) has become crucial for companies across sectors to ensure data security and privacy, but compliance management remains a cumbersome process for most businesses, as it requires teams to maintain records frequently and regularly monitor data flows.
Sprinto is working to automate this aspect of security compliance management, which involves vendor risk management, vulnerability assessment, access control, evidence collection and other filing tasks. The company’s platform connects directly with its customers’ HR, IT, and engineering systems via over 160 integrations and has baked-in support for popular frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), HIPAA, PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), and CIS. Sprinto uses a mix of AI, GPTs and its own internal large language model to offer efficiencies in compliance management. The company said it aims to focus more on bringing intelligence to the platform by bolstering its R&D.
“Our goal is to help companies build trust and grow their business using the trust they’ve built,” Sprinto’s co-founder, Girish Redekar, told TechCrunch.
The all-equity Series B funding round, which takes the company’s total capital raised to $31.8 million, was led by Accel. Existing investors Elevation Capital and Blume Ventures also participated.
The market for automated compliance management solutions already has players such as Vanta and Drata, which Sprinto considers its key competitors. However, Redekar said Sprinto primarily focuses on automating the entire compliance management process and helping businesses build trust.
Redekar founded Sprinto with Raghuveer Kancherla after their startup Recruiterbox was acquired by the private-equity firm Turn/River Capital in 2018. The co-founders were familiar with how difficult and onerous a problem compliance can be, and they set out to address that problem with their new startup.
Sprinto employs about 200 people, and Redekar said it currently has more than 1,000 customers across 75 countries, but a majority of its client base is in the U.S. and Europe. It plans to expand its presence in both these markets by attracting traditional businesses that have deployed tech but are not natively a tech company.
“The largest opportunity is in companies that are digitally native; they are not necessarily tech-first, but are tech-enabled. Increasingly, every company is a digital company in one way or another. We are really focused on growing that market,” Redekar told TechCrunch.
Redekar did not disclose the startup’s valuation, but Ravi Adusumalli, co-managing partner at Elevation Capital, said Sprinto has grown over 20x since it raised its Series A in 2021. Redekar said the company’s ARR rose 3x from 2022 to 2023, and is projected to double in the coming year.
“We are able to go a mile beyond just checking a box where you can show to an auditor that we do this, but we actually want to make you more secure. We want to do it more continuously. And we want to be able to build tools that help you demonstrate what you’re doing to external stakeholders,” he said.
The startup plans to utilize the fresh funding for product R&D and to cater to new businesses. Redekar said the plan is to scale its current intelligent automation by four times in less than 12 months.
“Sprinto is doing an incredible job of helping companies focus on their core business by making compliance low-touch, automated, and efficient. With a deep understanding of the product and a sharp focus on execution, Sprinto has been on a rare growth trajectory. We are thrilled to partner with Girish, Raghuveer, and their team at Sprinto in their mission to ensure that compliance becomes a driver of growth for businesses,” said Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel, in a prepared statement.
By any benchmark, Accel is among the top venture firms in India. With nearly two dozen Indian unicorn startups, including several category leaders, Accel’s track record speaks for itself. Yet the partners leading the firm’s early-stage accelerator program, called Atoms, are uncharacteristically introspective about their learnings and the changes they have been implementing to improve the odds of success.
“One fundamental belief we have is that at some point in time, all VC firms look the same to a founder. It’s just money,” said Prayank Swaroop, a partner at Accel, in an interview.
All VC firms have also grown increasingly focused on making early-stage investments in India in recent years and finding the next Flipkart at the seed stage. The shift is primarily driven by the realization that India is not producing many billion-dollar exits, making it imperative to the VC funds to get in earlier to dramatically improve their returns.
An accelerator program run by a fund that invests in startups at various stages faces unique challenges. If the firm fails to significantly support its accelerator portfolio in subsequent funding rounds, it can send a negative message to the industry. Furthermore, experienced entrepreneurs may not consider an accelerator to be the most suitable partnership option for their ventures.
These are some of the challenges Accel has been mulling over for nearly half a decade. Before launching Atoms, the venture firm explored building a knowledge repository and a community with SeedtoScale, an earlier program launched by Accel.
“We did Demo Days, we were trying to be very similar to a lot of other funds,” Swaroop told TechCrunch.
Just as fast as Accel tried things, it has also walked back some of its steps. It no longer attempts to initiate mingling between Atoms portfolio startups and other investors, for instance. Swaroop recalled a conversation with a founder who informed him how the investor meetup felt like the startup was being put on a treadmill to artificially impress other potential backers.
Other candid feedback from founders revealed that many were not comfortable engaging with peers in the industry who were years ahead of them.
“We are trying to find our own unique path, and what has worked for some of the other firms, we think it’s not working for us,” he said.
So here’s what that path looks like. Atom’s third cohort features just eight startups, which is notably fewer than other well-known accelerators. And all the selected startups operate within two sectors: AI and Industry 5.0 (smart manufacturing).
Accel invests up to $500,000 in each handpicked startup’s pre-seed round, and there is no valuation cap. In addition to helping the startup strategize, Accel also helps them meet industry players that can become potential partners and customers in the future.
Accel handpicked AI and Industry 5.0 as the themes for Atoms because the firm believes the two sectors will look far larger in the next 10 years, said Barath Subramanian, the other partner leading Atoms.
AI has obvious appeal. Meanwhile, Subramanian said Industry 5.0 has emerged as a key theme as the archaic plants in India and elsewhere finally modernize, paving ways for startups that are bringing efficiencies to take a slice of the tens of billions of dollars flowing to consulting firms and others each year. “These factories generate a lot of data, but until now it hadn’t been used,” said Subramanian.
The smart manufacturing sector has also benefited from New Delhi’s incentives to attract foreign firms to expand their manufacturing bases in the country and also the growing “China + 1” shift among global giants.
More than 800 startups applied to be in Atoms 3.0, and between 300 and 400 applicants were AI startups. Swaroop said nearly two-thirds of all pitches focused on AI startups that sought to solve HR and marketing problems. “If there’s too much noise in the market, it’s a signal for us that we should hunt elsewhere,” he said.
Pallavi Chakravorty, co-founder and CEO of Meritic, said in a statement to TechCrunch that being selected by Atoms has been impactful. “Beyond the capital and learning sessions, being part of Atoms has given us a strong founder community and highly collaborative peer group. For instance,” Chakravorty continued, “when Meritic is faced with a challenge, we can turn to any other team at Accel LaunchPad, which is where we currently operate, or to anyone from Accel’s network of over 200 portfolio company founders, to arrive at a solution.”
Below is the third cohort of Atoms:
Spintly
Spintly is an IoT platform that simplifies access control to commercial and residential buildings. Unlike traditional systems, Spintly uses a distributed IoT architecture and edge computing technology, which eliminates the need for heavy back-end infrastructure and enables smartphone-based door access to users. Spintly has eliminated 200k plastic badges and 2k miles for wired infrastructure from the built world and currently serves 300+ customers and 4k+ doors.Asets
Canada-based Asets has launched an AI-powered, first-of-its-kind cloud-based Integrated Design Suite, a multidisciplinary CAD, simulation and engineering design platform that helps Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) and end-owner companies accelerate their early-stage engineering by 10x. Customers benefit from the rapid deployment of engineering resources, lowering effort time and costs related to engineering projects.Tune AI
Tune AI is a GenAI stack for enterprises with solutions that include Tune Chat, an AI chat app with over 180,000 users and powerful models for text, code generation, and brainstorming, and Tune Studio, a comprehensive solution for fine-tuning, deploying, and managing the GenAI model lifecycle and enabling data security with enterprise-grade compliance.Skoob
Skoob is a generative AI platform which is revolutionizing the way readers interact with books. Instead of navigating through entire volumes, we harness the power of AI to dissect books into topic-centric sections. We are making knowledge consumption intuitive and user-friendly.Arivihan
Arivihan is India’s 1st AI-based 100% Automated Learning Platform providing each unique school student with a personal tutor in their pocket at ₹300 per month, guiding them in planning for their exams, teaching them with video lectures, talking to them, solving their queries instantly, and validating their knowledge by testing and improving them anytime they want, in the speed they require.Meritic
Meritic is a storytelling co-pilot for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams to automate reporting and business analytics. Meritic combines the power of knowledge graphs and language models to do highly contextual analysis, collect qualitative insights, generate relevant commentaries and automate financial deck creation.
(Two startups in the cohort remain in stealth for now.)
Founded in 2017, Atoms Lanka Solutions is a provider of IT consulting and software development services. Throughout the company’s history, we have worked with over 160 customers from 5+ countries..
