One of the reasons businesses in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region have operational challenges with revenue and collection is the variety of payment forms and providers available.
These businesses use outdated methods like Excel spreadsheets to document these collections, especially subscription-based ones, or build automated systems in-house.Therefore, they miss important information that leads to lost revenue and inefficiencies such as hiring more accountants to manage collections.
SubsBase, a no/low-code platform helps such businesses and eliminates the overhead of managing the entire subscription lifecycle of billing, payments, and notifications. An Egyptian startup has raised $2.4 million in seed funding led by Middle East and Africa-focused venture capital Global Ventures.
Other participating investors include HALA Ventures, P1 Ventures, Plus Venture Capital (+VC), Plug and Play, Ingressive Capital, Camel Ventures, and existing investors Falak Startups and Arzan Venture Capital.
SubsBase describes itself as the first and only subscription and recurring revenue management platform serving the MENA region. The cloud-based platform helps subscription and recurring revenue-based businesses with aggregation, processing, analytics, invoicing and billing tools to effectively manage their customers.
In a statement shared with TechCrunch, Subbase’s operating system enables customers to keep data simple and organized, integrate multiple third-party software applications, and automate billing and subscription invoicing.
“The problem with these businesses, even with huge enterprise accounts, is that a lot of people are doing all of their work manually and the information is a week or two late from the date of payment, which leads to lost revenue,” he said. Founder and CEO Mohamed Farag on a call with TechCrunch. “So once we get in, we’re going to solve these problems by giving them a single tool and platform to use everything in an integrated and real-time way and allow them to show more visible results in their business, but they happen to predict what’s going to happen and focus on their product above all else.” [those] “Surgical Headache.”
CEO SubsBase offers its platform to various customer segments and verticals. They are startups and SMEs (which he describes as a sweet spot for the company due to its pure SaaS businesses) and others such as lenders, insurance companies, real estate companies and e-commerce companies with recurring payments. Some of its clients include Clackett, Mermaid, OLX and Zammit.
SubsBase has been growing 200% month-on-month since its official launch a year ago, said Farag, who co-founded the company in 2020 with chief business officer Sherif Aziz. On the call, the founders noted that “SubsBase is running on SubsBase.” ” The platform uses a subscription-based business model. It has three different plans with fixed charges that customers can choose from. Customers charge different transaction fees on each plan.
There are similar providers in the US and Europe, including giant platforms like Chargebee and Recurly. If any of these platforms expand to MENA, they will need to integrate with local payment providers on the SubsBase platform, including international payment providers such as Stripe and PayPal. However, the localization of fees, with each region having its own rules and requirements, makes such an expansion plan unlikely, and as a result, SubsBase currently has little or no competition in the region.
“Being local and being a first mover, we can help these businesses grow and grow in the market and also meet their future needs when they decide to go to other countries or grow operations in other countries. And from there, we’ll grow our subscription base and grow more businesses,” Farag said. He gave his opinion.
Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the regions that SubsBase businesses aspire to serve. According to the CEO, the presence of pan-African investor Ingressive Capital – the fund’s first in Egypt – at the main table will facilitate these plans.
With this new investment, the company is looking to grow its business and branding efforts in MENA. He is responsible for the functional sales, direct sales team, customer success team and business development team, as well as increasing the product in marketing and content, including educational content and podcasts, educating the market on the subscription economy and how it works.
“We’re growing the team and resources to meet the demand we’re seeing in the region,” Aziz said on the call. “We’re prioritizing challenges in ways that codeless features can help grow and improve the market alongside integrations with other codeless platforms, so we’re encouraging people to start building businesses with a subscription model.”
Global Ventures General Partner Noor Swed highlighted why the Subscription Management and Recurring Billing Platform was supported, saying that his company saw an attractive and unique value that included a comprehensive and convenient platform to manage anything beyond subscription services. Recurring payments, from small subscriptions to car loans.
He added, “We are excited to support Muhammad and his team in their journey to build the first subscription management platform for the region.”
