Sympl, an Egyptian BNPL startup, has raised $6 million in funding to expand across the country

Sympl, an Egyptian “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) startup, has raised a seed round of $6 million to support its nationwide expansion and reach the country’s 49 million bank card holders.

Sympl, founded by Yasmine Henna, Mohamed El-Feky, and Karim Tawfik, launched its checkout platform in October through an exclusive partnership with leading Apple reseller Tradeline to coincide with the release of the new iPhone 13.

Since then, it has formed alliances with a number of other key retailers from a variety of industries, allowing merchants to sell products and services directly to bank card holders on short-term, interest-free repayment plans.

BECO Capital led the $6 million seed round, with participation from A15 (Disrupt Africa reported separately on that investment in November) and Global Ventures. Sympl plans to use the funds to expand its merchant network to serve multiple product and service categories across online and in-store merchants, as well as to improve its product offering to better serve platform customers. Sympl is already accepted in over 240 retail and online stores in Egypt, and the startup hopes to expand to 1,000 stores by the middle of next year.

“It’s a proud moment for the entire Sympl team to see market traction on the Sympl platform and to be supported by the region’s strongest VCs in our early launch stage,” said Mohamed El-Feky, co-founder and CEO of Sympl.

“This capital raise, as well as the support of BECO Capital, A15, and Global Ventures, demonstrate Sympl’s ability to scale and disrupt Egypt’s deferred payments industry, as well as the size of the market opportunity.” We are honored to have three of the leading MENA venture capital firms as partners, and we look forward to using this capital to fuel our expansion and meet Egypt’s brisk demand for pay later options.”

BECO’s managing partner, Yousef Hammad, expressed his firm’s excitement to collaborate with the Sympl team on its mission to close the gap in consumer access to pay later options in Egypt.

“We’ve been excited about the space for a while, and the team’s deep operational expertise, combined with Sympl’s unique approach, makes this partnership a great fit for BECO,” he said.