Egyptian startup bluworks, which is developing blue-collar HR-tech SaaS solutions, has raised a US$1 million pre-seed investment round to build and enhance its product, as well as expand its team.
Founded in 2022 by Farah Osman, Hussein Wahdan and Nour Ahmadein, bluworks is a mobile-first, all-in-one HR solution for blue-collar employees. The platform benefits employees and employers, helping companies streamline scheduling, communication, payroll, recognition and more across distributed teams and locations.
“With so many HR softwares in the market, not one is built to manage blue-collar workers,” Wahdan said. “Since the process of managing this type of workforce is so manual, errors frequently occur, leading to penalties and deducted salaries with no oversight from the workers, causing them to leave and ultimately contributing to high turnover rates. Currently, companies can spend about 7-10 days just closing their payroll accounts, but with bluworks, this time can be cut down to one day – all while leveraging data and insights on their workforce.”
The startup’s US$1 million pre-seed investment round was led by Saudi venture capital firm Khawarizmi Ventures, and also featured Camel Ventures, Acasia Ventures, and a pool of angel investors. bluworks will use the funding to build and enhance its product, as well as expand its team.
Today, bluworks has thousands of blue-collar workers on its platform, and tens of clients, such as Crave, Qahwa, and Cilantro, using the platform to manage them. The company is currently focusing on the F&B and retail sectors, with plans to expand to other sectors, such as manufacturing, construction, and facility management.
“We are excited about getting strategic investors on-board that can provide us with access to both local and regional markets, to which we are looking to expand. There is no shortage of industry use cases similar to Egypt around the world, and we are eager to tackle them with our innovative workforce management solutions,” said Osman.
Khwarizmii Ventures venture partner Ameer Sherif said Egypt had one of the largest workforce populations in the MENA and Africa region, yet very few software solutions that were truly localised.
“Like with many emerging markets, solutions to automate workforce management are still lacking. We believe that the bluworks team has the right mix between local understanding, and the commercial and technical capability to lead this space in Egypt and later in other regional markets,” he said.
