About Minly, the Egyptian Startup that just Raised $3.6 Million

A platform where celebrities get paid to send personalised video messages to their fans. Isn’t that interesting! That’s what Egyptian startup Minly makes possible. However, this is not a unique business model by Minly. As a matter of fact, the startup’s approach is modelled after Cameo, an American celebrity video sharing website with headquarters in Chicago, Illinois.

What is important, though, is the fact that Minly has successfully replicated the African variant of this new wave of celebrity video sharing. A look through the company’s website will show featured celebrities to include popular Egyptian actors, musicians and footballers including:  Hanan Motawie, Hamada Helal, Mohamed Barakat, etc.

Now, Minly is ready for expansion and its recent capital raise is expected to facilitate that. Information obtained by Business Elites Africa showed that the company received $3.6 million during a seed funding round that was co-led by 4DX Ventures, B&Y Venture Partners, Global Ventures. A number of other angel investors and regional funds also participated in the funding round which was described as “oversubscribed”.

It is not at all surprising that investors were scrambling over each other to participate in Minly’s seed funding. After all, the company has impressive stats —more than 50, 000 registered users and a long list of popular celebrities ready to record personalised messages upon request. Also, the fact that the company is among the first to venture into this line of business is the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa) means that it has the first mover advantage. Investors know this.

“Minly is fundamentally changing the relationship between celebrities and fans in the MENA region, and has an enormous opportunity for growth,” said Peter Orth, 4DX Venture’s Co-Founder & General Partner at 4DX Ventures.

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As earlier mentioned, Minly will put the funding to good use by expanding its products and services. Part of the statement by the company said its aim is to become a full-stack passion economy platform that will specialise in empowering digital content creators to deliver meaningful experiences across multiple mediums to fans. The company also aspires to one day become a unicorn.

“With this new funding and the partners that joined us, we are ready to scale across the region and introduce an exciting suite of new products. The creator economy is in its infancy and growing at lightning speed. We have the opportunity to build this category’s first unicorn in MENA,” said Mohamed El-Shinnawy, Minly’s co-founder.

It should be noted that Minly was established in 2020. So far, it has already raised a total of $4.3 million from eleven investors, according to information obtained from Crunchbase.