Egyptian startup oliv is providing electronic invoice financing to small and medium businesses, performing data-driven credit assessment that approves credit limits within minutes, and disburses funds to clients within 48 hours.
Founded in February 2024 by Ziad Mokhtar, ex-founding partner of Algebra Ventures, and Hatem Sabry, ex-director at Deutsche Bank, oliv is a digital invoice financing company serving SMEs, whose service involves minimal manual interactions and no tech requirements, thus delivering funding in less than two days.
Disrupt Africa reported last month the startup had secured Egypt’s first digital factoring license from the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA). The digital factoring license issued by the FRA is the first business lending license to be issued under the fintech law number five for the year 2022 and the FRA decree 268 for the year 2023, which is tailored for venture-backed fintech companies. It allows oliv to offer fully digital factoring and reverse-factoring services to Egyptian businesses.
oliv is contributing to filling a US$39 billion funding gap in the SME segment in Egypt, including around US$8 billion in invoice financing specifically.
“oliv competes with traditional factoring companies that typically take longer times to underwrite clients and only serve 600 clients, mostly large companies, leaving behind more than 219,000 SMEs underserved,” said Mokhtar.
oliv raised a pre-seed round last year from Algebra Ventures and Alter Global to fund its path to licensing and initial launch. Mokhtar said it is now in discussions with investors to bring its total capital raised up to US$4 million.
“Prior to launch, oliv has gathered interest from potential clients in various sectors and already disbursed its first financing transactions days after obtaining the license from the Financial Regulatory Authority,” said Mokhtar.
“We believe the problem we are solving is common across the Middle East and Africa. We further believe that the enabling factors for our solution are also happening across the region. That said, for the medium term will be focusing on Egypt.”
