Egypt’s SubsBase raises $2.4 million for its subscription and recurring revenue management platform – TechCrunch

Having different payment methods and providers is one of the reasons why businesses in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region face operational challenges in revenue and collection management.

These businesses often use outdated methods such as Excel spreadsheets to keep track of these collections, especially subscriptions, or build their own automation systemsthus, they lose critical data, leading to lost revenue and inefficiencies, such as hiring more accountants than required to manage collections.

Subbase, a no/low-code platform, helps such businesses and removes their overhead by managing the full subscription lifecycle, including invoicing, payments and notifications. The Egyptian startup has raised $2.4 million in seed funding led by Global Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on the Middle East and Africa.

Other participating investors included HALA Ventures, P1 Ventures, Plus Venture Capital (+VC), Plug and Play, Ingressive Capital, Camel Ventures, and existing investors Falak Startups and Arzan Venture Capital.

SubsBase describes itself as the first and only recurring revenue subscription and management platform serving the MENA region. The cloud-based platform helps subscription-based and recurring revenue businesses with collection, operations, analytics, billing and invoicing tools for efficient customer management.

According to a statement provided to TechCrunch, SubsBase’s operating system enables customers to simplify and keep information organized and tasks simple, integrate with multiple third-party software programs, and automate invoicing and subscription billing.

“The problem that these businesses face, even the huge corporate accounts, is that they have a lot of people doing all the work manually, and the data is delayed for one to two weeks from the date of actual payments, resulting in lost revenue,” he said. said founder and CEO Mohamed Farag during a conversation with TechCrunch. “So as soon as we step in, we solve those problems by giving them a single tool and platform to use where everything comes together and works in real-time, allowing them to see and have more visibility into their business results and predict, what will happen next and focus on their product rather than everything [those] headaches after surgery.’

The CEO said that SubsBase provides its platform to different customer segments and verticals. These include startups and SMEs (which he describes as the company’s sweet spot because of their pure SaaS business) and other businesses such as lenders, insurance companies, real estate companies and recurring payment e-commerce companies. Some of its clients include Clakett, Mermaid, OLX and Zammit.

SubsBase has grown 200% monthly since its official launch more than a year ago, said Farag, who co-founded the company with Chief Business Officer Sherif Aziz in 2020. During the conversation, the founders noted that in addition to “SubsBase running on SubsBase,” the platform also uses a subscription-based business model; it has three different fixed fee plans that customers can choose from. Customers are also charged a different transaction fee for each plan.

Similar providers exist in the US and Europe, including mainstream platforms such as Chargebee and Recurly. If any of these platforms expand to MENA, they will need to integrate with Fawry, Paymob and PayTabs, local payment providers that already work on the SubsBase platform, including global payment providers such as Stripe and PayPal. However, the localized nature of payments, where each region has its own rules and requirements, makes such an expansion plan unlikely, and thus SubsBase currently has little to no competition in the region.

“By being localized and as an early adopter, we will be able to help these businesses grow and scale in the market, and we will be able to meet their future needs as they decide to expand into other countries or expand their operations in other countries. And then we’ll grow our subscription base, and we’ll also enable more businesses to grow,” Farag commented.

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the regions where SubsBase aims to serve businesses. The executive director said that the presence of pan-African investor Ingressive Capital — the first fund in Egypt — will facilitate the implementation of such plans.

With this new investment, the company also aims to scale up its commercial and branding efforts in the Middle East and North Africa. He’s hiring operational sales, direct sales, customer success and business development teams, and increasing marketing and content, including educational content and podcasts, educating the market about the subscription economy and how it works.

“We are increasing our team and resources to be able to meet the demands we are seeing across the region,” Aziz said during the call. “We’re prioritizing challenges in a way that helps them grow and catalyze the no-code market on the one hand by seamlessly integrating with other no-code platforms so that people can and are encouraged to build businesses with subscription models.”

Global Ventures General Partner Noor Sweid, highlighting the reasons for supporting the subscription management and recurring billing platform, said his firm saw a compelling and unique value proposition that went beyond subscription services to include a comprehensive and user-friendly platform for managing any recurring payments, from small subscriptions to car loans.

“We are very excited to support Mohamed and the team in their journey to create the region’s first subscription management platform,” he added.