Wasla raises $180,000 pre-seed
Source: Menabytes
Cairo-based Wasla has raised $180,000 in pre-seed funding from a group of angel investors led by a Cairo-based investment banker Omar Barakat, the startup told MENAbytes in an interview.
Founded earlier this year by former Rocket Internet entrepreneurs, Serag Meneassy and Taymour Sabry, and Mahmoud El Said, an investment anker who had initially joined as an investor in the bcompany, Wasla is an Android mobile browser that provides users with free internet through subsidizing data costs by leveraging digital ads.
The company had been working in stealth mode for almost one year before launching the browser at the 2018 Rise Up Summit in Cairo this week.
Wasla gamifies the experience by allowing users to freely surf the internet while completing in-app missions and actions to earn points – the points can then be exchanged for free mobile data and airtime directly from Wasla. The company has some local payment partners on-board with them to make this happen but wouldn’t share details.
“Users earn points for doing the things they do online everyday, visiting their social media profiles, watching videos, reading articles and surfing the web in general. We created a reward logic for every action the user performs and is weighted depending on importance – for example, sharing with a friend is more important than opening a notification,” explained Serag Meneassy, Wasla’s co-founder in an interview with MENAbytes.
