Egyptian recycling-technology startup Bekia has raised $765,000 in seed funding to build what its founder describes as a missing record layer for Egypt’s waste economy, while using the funding to launch a new business product and test its model in a second African market.
The round was led by Madica, the Africa-focused investment programme affiliated with Flourish Ventures, with follow-on investment from Catalyst Fund, which first backed Bekia in 2023, and participation from Dakar-based Jambaar Capital.
Founded in 2019 by Alaa Afifi, a computer science graduate of Cairo University, Bekia’s original product was simple: households schedule a collection through the app, a collector turns up at an agreed time, the material gets weighed and priced on site, and the household is paid directly into a bank account or e-wallet.
According to Afifi, Egypt was never short of recyclable material or demand for it. What the market lacked was a link between the households sitting on that material and the factories that wanted to buy it.
“Egypt’s recycling sector has always worked — it just worked invisibly, on cash and trust, with no record of any of it,” Afifi said. “We built the software layer that changes that: a collector gets a transaction history, a factory gets traceable supply, a household learns what its waste is actually worth. The material itself is a commodity, but the record of it isn’t, and nobody in our market owns that record yet.”
Why Bekia is making this move now
Egypt produces roughly 60,000 tonnes of municipal waste a day, most of it still ending up in open dumps rather than recycling plants, and the government has set a target of lifting the national recycling rate to 60% by 2027, up from around 37% in 2024.
Almost all of the collection that happens today runs through informal channels, without contracts, licences, or records of any kind. That regulatory push gives Bekia’s traceability product a commercial use case beyond convenience. Businesses that can verify where their recycled material came from may be better positioned as reporting requirements tighten, particularly when working with multinational clients that need to document their waste footprint.
The new funding will expand Bekia’s engineering team and fund the launch, at the end of October, of Bekia Next, its first B2B software product. Bekia Next converts the platform’s collection data into verified CO₂-avoidance certificates for corporate clients, using established international carbon accounting methodology. It marks a shift for the company from selling a collection service to selling a subscription product built on data it already had, which is a notable move for a startup whose original business was logistics, not software licensing.
According to figures Bekia has self-reported, the company has diverted more than 25,000 tonnes of waste from landfill, served over 100,000 customers, 97% of them women, and enabled more than 2,400 people to earn income through its network, while growing more than sevenfold since 2023.
Enterprise retention is reported to be above 95%. Revenue currently comes from a mix of enterprise contracts, household collections, and refurbished electronics, the last of which produced its first revenue in June 2026.
Investors are framing the raise around infrastructure rather than a single product line. “Since then, Bekia has grown more than 7x while building a stronger B2B-led platform that diverts waste from landfill and formalises a fragmented waste sector,” said Maxime Bayen, Partner at Catalyst Fund.
“Our decision to re-invest reflects our conviction that Bekia can become critical climate infrastructure for Egypt and the region.” July Andraous, managing partner at Jambaar Capital, also described Bekia as building “an important infrastructure layer in Egypt’s recycling economy,” pointing to improving unit economics alongside the company’s growth as the basis for reinvesting.
Bekia has said it will begin testing its approach in a second African market with this funding, without naming which one. That expansion will put Afifi’s core thesis, that the real value sits in the record of a transaction rather than the material itself, up against a different regulatory environment and a different informal waste economy than the one Bekia has spent six years learning to formalise in Egypt.
Read also: Lebara announces commercial launch in Nigeria; can it break the MVNO jinx?
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