Egyptian Startup Entreprenelle Raises Investment from EdVentures

Egyptian startup Entreprenelle, which strives to democratize an entrepreneurial ecosystem by connecting women with resources to become entrepreneurs, has just raised investment by EdVentures, Egypt’s first corporate venture capital that specialises in education technology, as the incubator starts its first cycle with four other startups. 

Founded by Rania Ayman, the startup is a mission-driven enterprise that strives to bridge the gender and economic gap and empower women by educating, training and linking them to resources, having impacted more than 10,000 women in 5 different governorates with more than 80 entrepreneurship workshops and 10 big entertaining educational events.

The four other startups in the cycle include OTO, Yohka Anna, Greenish, Entreprenelle, and Books Bike. OTO is an interactive tutoring website that hosts one-to-one online education. It currently offers programs in English and German languages, and in Graphic Designing. The programmes are provided online through a platform that makes digital learning easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable than traditional learning. The portal features more than 50 qualified instructors in addition to modern curricula. 

Yohka Anna creates a unique reading journey for children by providing storytelling workshops, books, and managing book clubs to offer children an engaging reading experience. By doing so, Yohka Anna revives the rituals of storytelling and works on feeding and enriching children’s imagination.

Greenish offers education in an innovative and collective way through the use of performative and visual arts. The startup focuses on environment conservation through developing educational curricula tailored for children and youth. They deliver their messages through innovative workshops that vary from storytelling workshops, recycling arts, home planting, mandalas, and stones art, drama and theatre workshops.

Finally, Books Bike is a portable bookstore that makes books more accessible and available; hence facilitating the buying process and encouraging more people to read by removing the psychological and distance barriers between the readers and bookstores.  Books bike currently works with the capacity of two bicycles and planning to expand in different districts across Egypt in 2018.

EdVentures, launched in October 2017 by Nahdet Misr Publishing Group in partnership with the Academy of Scientific Research & Technology (ASRT’s Intilac) project and the USAID’s Strengthening Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development (SEED) project, is the first incubator in the MENA that incubates, accelerates and further invests in startups specializing in education and learning. 

Over the past couple of months, EdVentures has received numerous applications from startups to join its programmes. EdVentures will offer a wide range of services to support these young entrepreneurs starting from analyzing their customers’ needs and market landscape, planning execution and delivering solutions to their target customers with a strategy in place for monitoring and evaluation. This would be followed by further investment to ignite growth and expansion.

Main photo by @MO4Network's #MO4Productions.