Egyptian Legal Platform StartRight Launches 'Startup Legal ScoreCard'

In the world of startups and entrepreneurship, we love to throw around words like ‘bootstrapping’, we love to talk about ‘the struggle’. On the outside looking in, however, we rarely ever dive deep into the real issues that Egypt’s innovators face.

This is where StartRight comes in. Launched in early 2021 by one of Egypt's most prolific law firms, Shehata & Partners, StartRight is a unique platform that has one core goal: to support Egypt’s incredible pool of entrepreneurial talent, the men and women that have and are making Egypt one of the most exciting markets for innovation today - not only on a regional level, but a global level too. 

It’s an ambitious undertaking, yes, but what StartRight does is think of all the in-between bits - not least the inevitable legal ranklings that are part and parcel of starting your own business in this part of the world.

“We started this product as we felt there is a growing need for customising legal services for the booming startup ecosystem,” one of the firm's partners and the mastermind behind StartRight, Ibrahim Shehata, told StartupScene during last year's launch. “We kept getting different inquiries that we felt that everybody should know about already and that’s why our first move was to create a full legal guide for startups.”

While StartRight might be considered Sheata & Partners’ own innovation, the platform still leans on over quarter-of-a-century’s worth of experience and history in the field, history that has seen it work with numerous startups and SMEs in Egypt and the MENA region. Keeping in line with both ecosystems’ continual and unexpected evolution, StartRight’s services are also constantly being evolved and developed to better suit the need here-and-now needs of startups.

The platform’s later offering comes in the form of a new tool: Startup Legal ScoreCard. Aimed at young startups still in the pre-seed or seed stages, the scorecard simplifies those first few sticky steps, breaking down the dos and don'ts of making their startups investment-friendly - or, better yet, investment-ready. 

This unique checkpoint system is free-to-use from anywhere in the world, taking up no more than five minutes, with 10 core questions touching on a startup's corporate structure, employment, intellectual property, data protection and fund-raising. From there, startups can begin to understand where they lack and how best to proceed.

StartRight has amassed its own experience through an impressive portfolio that includes startups from across a number of sectors, such as Trella, KarmSolar and Moazare3, as well as other key ecosystem stakeholders including the likes of Falak Startups, Fintech Galaxy and EFGEV Fintech.