Fincart is Tackling Shipping & Finance Challenges for Small Businesses

Small e-commerce businesses can have plenty of orders coming in and still struggle to keep going. In Egypt, where cash on delivery remains common, the money from a sale can take weeks to reach the merchant. In the meantime, they still have inventory to replenish, employees to pay and more orders to fulfil.

When Mostafa Masry and Nihal Ali started Fincart in 2023, they were initially trying to make shipping easier for small online merchants who often paid more than larger businesses to get the same products delivered. The idea grew out of their own experiences in e-commerce and logistics.

Ali’s first encounter with the problem came through a business selling glass water flasks online. The products repeatedly broke during shipping, and the venture eventually failed. She later moved into product management at a fulfilment company, gaining experience in warehousing and the logistics behind online orders.

Masry, meanwhile, had spent years working on logistics at scale. At Jumia, he managed courier companies and last-mile operations during Black Friday, where he saw how dramatically shipping terms could differ according to a merchant’s size.

A small seller, he says, could pay as much as 50% more than a larger business to ship an identical order with the same courier.

“The smaller seller was the last person businesses thought about and the last person to get good support,” Masry says.

Masry and Ali had known each other for almost 15 years, and their experiences led them to the same problem from different directions. They began developing Fincart as a platform through which smaller sellers could access courier companies without being disadvantaged by their lack of scale.

But once merchants began using it, another problem became apparent.

Sellers would sign up, begin shipping and then abruptly stop. When the founders contacted them, the reason was often cash flow. Their orders had been delivered, but their cash-on-delivery payments had not yet reached them.

In a cash-on-delivery transaction, money collected from a customer can move through several stages before reaching the seller, passing from the courier to a hub, through accounting and eventually into the banking system. Even after a successful delivery, Masry says, merchants could be left waiting weeks.

“We realised that, through our platform, we could see their sales and had a lot of data about them,” Masry says. “So, we thought, ‘Why don’t we use this to enable them to access cash advances based on their sales volume, so they can keep shipping and their businesses don’t stop?’”

That observation changed Fincart’s direction. The company began handling cash collection on behalf of merchants and working with financing partners to provide advances based partly on activity recorded through the platform.

Fincart analyses factors including order volumes, average shipment values and seasonal sales patterns. Fintech companies and licensed lenders handle underwriting and provide the financing, while Fincart supports collection.

The result was a business that grew beyond shipping aggregation. “We moved on from being an aggregation centre to a shipping and financing gateway for e-commerce,” Masry says.

Fincart now describes itself as an AI-powered operating system for e-commerce merchants. Its platform integrates with more than 40 shipping providers and combines shipment management, cash-on-delivery reconciliation, short-term financing and tools intended to help merchants manage customer relationships and sales.

Its Egyptian origins still surprise some of the businesses using it.

“Sometimes it’s funny and sad at the same time,” Masry says. “I show them my platform and the portal, and they think it’s not an Egyptian company. They think it’s a foreign company. This is developed by Egyptians in Egypt.”

For Masry, the wider opportunity lies in making the infrastructure behind e-commerce more accessible. Starting an online brand may require considerably less capital than opening a physical shop, but logistics, financing and other operational systems can still put smaller businesses at a disadvantage.

“If you can support thousands of local brands, that will help grow the middle class, strengthen the economy and improve people’s lives,” he says.

The founders also had to apply that same discipline to Fincart itself. They bootstrapped the company through its early years, investing almost $100,000 of their own money and prioritising viable unit economics from the outset.

“We couldn’t buy growth,” Masry says. “We couldn’t lose money just to acquire customers and figure out the unit economics later.”

That approach became important when Fincart eventually began speaking to investors.

“We built the business model from the beginning, and it was very important for us to make sure the unit economics worked,” he says. “This helped us a lot in getting investors on board. They saw that the business was frugal.”

Between 2024 and 2025, Masry says Fincart grew by an average of four times year over year in size and revenue. In July 2026, it raised $2.8 million in an oversubscribed seed round to expand its commercial and technology teams, develop the product and establish new partnerships in Egypt ahead of planned expansion into other markets in 2027.

For Masry, however, the funding round represented less of a finish line than another stage in building the company.

“It’s a bit validating, especially when you get the investors we had on board,” he says. “They’re really reputable investors. Them believing in Fincart, believing in the traction, the story, us as founders and the team is a very nice, validating feeling for 10 days. Then the actual work begins.”

Part of that work involves artificial intelligence, although Masry is wary of how readily the label is applied across the startup sector.

For him, an AI-powered product requires more than attaching a new feature to an existing platform. It depends on trained models, substantial quantities of data, infrastructure capable of processing it and people who can build and maintain those systems.

Fincart therefore did not begin as an AI-first business. The team initially ran many processes manually, using that experience to understand where automation could genuinely remove repetitive work.

“When you’re building a startup, you have to do a lot of things manually in the beginning to understand what breaks during the process,” Masry says. “Once you realise that the operation is repetitive and there’s a lot of work to be done, you can properly use AI to optimise it.”

Finding the people capable of doing that work has presented another challenge.

“Founders generally love ideas. You start something, you’re excited about it, and you have all this energy. You mistakenly assume that everyone else is going to have the same enthusiasm about your idea and share your energy. That’s not true,” Masry says.

For an early-stage company, he adds, technical ability is only part of the equation.

“It’s challenging to find people who are not only talented but who can also get excited about building an early-stage startup and have that risk appetite. You’re not a corporation. You’re not established.”

Fincart’s next phase will involve expanding both the team and the platform as it prepares to move beyond Egypt.

“We want to be at the forefront of it,” Masry says. “In the next few years, we want Fincart to become the number one partner for e-commerce growth in the region.”