Cairo-based fintech company MoneyFellows has raised US$13 million in a pre-series C funding round.

The round was led by Al Mada Ventures and DPI’s Nclude Fund, with participation from Partech Africa and CommerzVentures, bringing total funding to over US$60 million.

Founded in 2016, MoneyFellows digitizes the traditional Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA) model, known as gam’eya in Egypt.

Its platform allows users to join or create savings groups, enabling collective pooling and payouts with minimal reliance on working capital.

MoneyFellows plans to expand regionally, with operations in Morocco expected to launch by the end of 2025.

The company also plans to expand its offerings into payroll, insurance, and remittance services.

🔗 Source: TechCrunch

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ Digitizing ancient financial systems creates efficient fintechs where others fail

MoneyFellows demonstrates how traditional financial practices can be successfully adapted to digital platforms rather than replaced by them.

Unlike many fintechs that build entirely new financial products, MoneyFellows digitized ROSCAs (Rotating Savings and Credit Associations), financial arrangements with roots going back hundreds or thousands of years according to investor Omar Laalej 1.

This approach has yielded remarkable efficiency. While traditional lenders must borrow money to lend it out, MoneyFellows only needs to fund about 7-8% of slots in their circles, allowing them to facilitate billions in transactions with minimal capital exposure 1.

The success contrasts with numerous failed attempts to digitize ROSCAs by banks and telcos globally, who “underestimated how complex the underlying behavior is,” as Wadi noted 1.

The company’s eight years spent refining their model in Egypt before expanding regionally shows that successfully digitizing traditional financial systems requires deep cultural understanding and technical sophistication.

2️⃣ Community finance scales through technology with the right approach

ROSCAs traditionally operate in small, trusted circles where social pressure ensures compliance, but MoneyFellows has extended this trust mechanism to 8.5 million users.