Egyptian Real Estate Startup Boyot Raises Six-Figure Pre-Seed Round

Boyot, an Egyptian startup that offers an end-to-end operating system for payments and financial services focused exclusively on the real estate market, has raised $250,000 in a pre-Seed round led by Kuwaiti angel investors.

Founded in 2020 by Mahmoud El Sabongy, Khaled El Refaay, and Mohamed Sayed, Boyot enables real estate firms to digitize their payment operations and track the status of customer payments. Companies can also leverage the existing application programming interface (APIs) to provide and launch financial products such as buy now and pay later (BNPL).

"Poor cash flow management is one of the key challenges hurdling the growth of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) operating in the local real estate market in Egypt,” Mahmoud El Sabongy, CEO and co-founder of Boyot, says. “About 85 percent of merchants don’t get their receivables through cheques. Instead, they either send out agents to perform cash transactions or get the payment through a bank transfer. Irregular cash collection methods ultimately translate into lower margins. As merchants scale, the payment collection process becomes more and more complicated and far from straightforward, leaving businesses struggling with inconsistent gains.”

The startup began operations in May; shortly afterwards, Misr Asset Management Company, the real estate arm of Misr Insurance Company, became its first corporate client.

Boyot plans on opening its office in Kuwait later this year, and aims to use this fund to expand its client base, invest in its product technology, and hire personnel specialised in tech and businesses.

The software as a service (SaaS) market has been growing exponentially during the past few years in the Middle East and Africa. It is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.25% between 2018 and 2023 according to Quadintel.