Just over a year since it’s launch, MAGNiTT today releases its latest statistics from the region’s largest online community of startups, investors and support services.
With startups spanning Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Morocco, the UAE and KSA, the geographic spread on the platform shows the 42% of the registered startups coming from the UAE and only 5% coming from KSA. According to MAGNiTT, KSA is the largest economy in the region, but has the smallest proportion of startups registered on the platform, with ABCD (Amman, Beirut, Cairo and Dubai) making up 71% of the startups. Arabic centric countries are less common on the platform, an area that the MAGNiTT team are looking to address and grow.
Out of interest for investors, almost half of all startups have self-selected that they are generating revenue. They still however are struggling to fundraise from the missing angel investor community as half of the startups are looking to raise funding of less that $250,000. “Many of these startups are not fundable for venture capitalists (VCs) however in the absence of the angel investor community they are required to apply to VCs. Solving for this funding gap is one of the key pain points for growth of the MENA startup ecosystem,” according to Founder Philip Bahoshy. “Currently, there are just over 200 angel investors on the MAGNiTT platform, but our goal is to further grow this number of investors”.
He also highlights that aside from funding, MAGNiTT has seen a large proportion of entrepreneurs placing a huge importance on non-financial support. Mentorship was the biggest requirement sited by over 50% of the registered founders while marketing assistance (49%), legal support (25%) and IT development (22%) were also mentioned as services required. Interestingly for those looking to join a startup nearly 20% of Startups were looking for co-founders to join their venture.
MAGNiTT continues to build the bridge between startups and the corporate sector by harnessing relationships with leading institutions to provide unique offerings for Startups to benefit from.