Egyptian food discovery and ordering startup elmenus has raised a US$8 million Series B funding round as it continues to scale across the country.
Founded in 2011 by CEO Amir Allam, elmenus is a food discovery and online food delivery platform with personalised recommendations to users at the dish-level through its AI-powered food recommendation engine.
The startup has grown quickly, launching online ordering operations and recently its own fleet service, scaling from 20 to 200 employees and experiencing double digit growth monthly. It has now raised US$8 million in a Series B funding round led by Global Ventures, a UAE-based venture capital fund focused on enterprise technology solutions across the Middle East and Africa region, and Algebra Ventures, the leading technology venture capital firm in Egypt, which also invested in elmenus back in 2017.
Also involved are Tarek Sakr and Hamad Al Homaizi, both prominent entrepreneurs having partially exited 4Sale, the leading Kuwait-based classifieds platform, to NBK Capital last year. The investment will be used to help the startup further expand across Egypt.
“We believe our success as a startup is a combination of innovatively solving the right user problems, great team and laser focused execution. We have been able to grow the market in Egypt and accomplish great milestones very efficiently, we are excited about what we will do with this additional funding and the support of Global Ventures coming on board as we continue to scale across Egypt and help millions of more users to discover and order the food they will love,” said Allam.
“We are incredibly excited to announce Global Ventures’ investment in a leading food-tech startup such as elmenus, and look forward to working closely with the team in terms of driving further value creation opportunities that result in continued growth,” said Basil Moftah, general partner at Global Ventures.
“With their first raise of US$1.5 million, elmenus proved our original investment thesis that a strong local player with a broader offering can have disproportionate achievement. The company has unique efficiencies and this round could be enough to secure its leadership in the rapidly growing digital market in Egypt,” said Ziad Mokhtar, managing partner at Algebra Ventures.
