The presence of different payment forms and providers is one of the reasons why companies in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region have operational challenges in managing revenue and collections.
These companies often use outdated methods such as Excel sheets to keep track of these collections, especially on a subscription basis, or build in-house automation systemstherefore, they miss out on vital data, leading to lost revenue and inefficiencies, such as hiring more accountants than necessary to manage collections.
SubsBase, a no/low-code platform, helps such businesses and removes their overhead by managing the full subscription lifecycle of billing, payments and notifications. The Egyptian startup has raised $2.4 million in seed funding led by Middle East and Africa-focused venture capital firm Global Ventures.
Other participating investors were 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 for the MENA region. The cloud-based platform helps subscription and recurring revenue businesses with its collection, operations, analytics, invoicing and billing tools to efficiently manage their customers.
According to a statement shared with ukbusinessupdates.com, SubsBase’s operational system enables customers to simplify and keep information organized and tasks simple, integrate multiple third-party software applications, and automate subscription billing and billing.
“The problem these companies face, even large corporate accounts, is that many people are doing all the work manually and the data is delayed for a week or two from the date of actual payments, leading to lost revenue,” said co-founder and CEO Mohamed Farag in conversation with ukbusinessupdates.com. “So once we jump in, we solve these problems by giving them a single tool and platform to use where everything is aggregated and in real time so that they can see and have a more visible result on their business, as well as predict it.” what’s going to happen. happen and focus on their product instead of everything [those] surgery headache.”
The chief executive said SubsBase offers its platform to various customer segments and verticals. They are startups and SMEs (which he describes as the sweet spot for the company because of their purely SaaS operations) and other businesses such as lenders, insurance companies, real estate companies and e-commerce companies with recurring payments. Some of her clients are Clakett, Mermaid, OLX and Zammit.
SubsBase has grown 200% month over month since its official launch more than a year ago, said Farag, who co-founded the company in 2020 with chief business officer Sherif Aziz. During the call, the founders pointed out that in addition to “SubsBase runs on SubsBase”, the platform also uses a subscription-based business model; it has three different flat fee plans that customers can choose from. Customers also pay different transaction fees for each plan.
Similar providers exist in the US and Europe, including huge platforms like Chargebee and Recurly. Should any of these platforms expand to MENA, they will need to integrate with Fawry, Paymob, and PayTabs, which are local payment providers already on the SubsBase platform, including global payment providers such as Stripe and PayPal. However, the localized nature of payments, where each region has its regulations and requirements, makes such an expansion plan unlikely and as such SubsBase currently enjoys little or no competition in the region.
“By being localized and as a first mover, we can help these companies grow and scale in the market, as well as meet their future needs when they decide to move to other countries or grow operations in other countries. And from there we will expand our subscription base and grow more businesses,” said Farag.
Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the regions where SubsBase likes to serve companies. The chief executive said having a pan-African investor Ingressive Capital – the fund’s first in Egypt – on the cap table will facilitate such plans.
With this new investment, the company also intends to step up commercial and branding efforts in MENA. It is recruiting staff for its operations sales, direct sales team, customer success team, and business development team, as well as increasing output in marketing and content, including educational content and podcasts, to educate the market about the subscription economy and how it works.
“We are expanding the team and resources to meet the demands we see across the region,” Aziz said during the call. “We prioritize issues in a way that helps them grow and catalyze the market with no-code features from one side of integration with other no-code platforms seamlessly so that people can and are encouraged to build businesses with subscription models.”
The general partner at Global Ventures, Noor Sweid, highlighted the reasons why the subscription management and recurring billing platform was supported, said his company saw an attractive and unique value proposition that goes beyond subscription services and includes a comprehensive and convenient platform for managing all recurring payments, from small subscriptions to car loans.
“We are excited to support Mohamed and the team on their journey to build the region’s first subscription management platform,” he added.
