EGYPT – Cassbana, an Egypt-based fintech startup, has secured US$1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Disruptech Ventures, an Egyptian fintech-focused venture capitalist fund along with several other fintech funds and angel investors.
“We are happy to be leading this pre-seed round in Cassbana’s journey. The Egyptian Fintech ecosystem is one of the biggest worldwide, our role as a fund is to support Fintech companies from the beginning all the way through local and international IPOs,” said Mohamed Okasha, Head of Disruptech Ventures.
“We have seen Cassbana’s teamwork ethic first-hand and their growth over the past 6 months has been massive. Disruptech admires their strategic vision both locally and internationally and this is why we chose to lead the company’s first investment round.”
“Our goal is to create financial identities for the underserved and unbanked who cannot receive financing options from their suppliers and service providers to scale their small shadow businesses or to pass through a difficult time in their business journey.”
Haitham Nassar – Founder and CEO, Cassbana
Founded in early 2020 by a former Careem executive Haitham Nassar, Cassbana is building financial identities for different types of users especially those who don’t use conventional banking services.
It does this by offering lending solutions to different groups of these users and then using artificial intelligence and different other technologies to assign credit scores to them. In its own words, it uses short instant loans, behavioral data from the users, and machine learning, to build their financial identities.
Cassbana has developed an android app that enables financial institutions and companies to create innovative lending and financial support solutions through an analysis of the behaviour patterns of their customers.
“Our goal is to create financial identities for the underserved and unbanked who cannot receive financing options from their suppliers and service providers to scale their small shadow businesses or to pass through a difficult time in their business journey,” Haitham Nassar, founder, and CEO of Cassbana said.
“Instead of them being assumed to be a high default risk, our financial identities offer them a chance to receive different financing options with a low risk of default.”
Cassbana aims to create one-million financial identities before the end of 2021 and the secured funding will assist them in achieving this goal.
The majority of Egypt’s population, according to different estimates is unbanked and doesn’t have access to financial services. Cassbana is building financial identities for this majority, starting with the people behind very small retail businesses (think neighborhood grocery stores, for example). It aims to create financial identities for one million customers by the end of the year.
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