Egyptian Real Estate Platform Sakneen Announces Backing By Y Combinator

Y Combinator has just tapped its newest Arab startup, Egyptian real-estate platform Sakneen. Only launched late last year, the startup aims to revolutionise the home-buying process in Egypt, and now joins Y Combinator’s list of illustrious alumni, which include Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, and Stripe. Sakneen has graduated as part of the accelerator’s Winter 2020 batch, and raised a $150,000 investment in the process. 

Sakneen aims to reinvent the real estate process by “helping real estate developers and sellers connect directly with potential buyers. While the need for a superior digital experience was always clear, it was only made more urgent by the impact of COVID-19,” Co-Founders Ramy Khorshed and Hussein El Kheshen explain in a statement.

With specific online processes for individual buyers/sellers, real estate developers looking to digitise, and brokers, the startup’s edge is its technology, which it uses to cut through the quagmire that make the real estate process so difficult: commission structures, lack of financial transparency, disorganised public information, and mismatched incentives that don’t prioritise the needs of the buyer.

Khorshed and Kheshen told StartupScene that, within 24 hours of officially launching Sakneen, they received hundreds of buyer requests and more than 10 property developers that reached out for a demo of their product. Beyond that, the dynamic startup seems to be attracting the attention of talented Egyptians, with over 30 job applications flooding their inbox on the first day.

“At YC, we help talented founders from anywhere in the world to access the advice, network, and funding that Silicon Valley has to offer,” says Aaron Epstein, partner at Y Combinator. “With Sakneen, we see dedicated founders, tackling a huge problem, in a region of the world that has tons of opportunity for tech investment. It was an obvious decision to fund them and pleasure for us to support them.”