Exclusive: Egyptian fintech Dayra gets Y Combinator’s backing, raises $3 million in pre-seed

Exclusive: Egyptian fintech Dayra gets Y Combinator’s backing, raises $3 million in pre-seed

Cairo-based fintech Dayra has joined Y Combinator and raised $3 million in a pre-seed round that includes a mix of equity and debt financing, it told MENAbytes today. The round includes investment from Tanmiya Capital Ventures, EFG EV, EFG Hermes, and different angel investors. Dayra raised the majority of these funds last year and closed the round with the investment from Y Combinator. The fintech is part of ongoing YC's Winter 2021 (YC W21) batch and has received the standard $125,000 investment as part of the accelerator program.

Founded in early 2020 by Omar Ekram who was previously a private equity investor, Dayra enables companies of different sizes to provide financial services to their workforce through APIs and its mobile app. Omar was previously the Managing Partner at Tanmiya Capital Ventures, a firm that invested in this round. He has told MENAbytes that Tanmiya's participation does not exceed 10 percent of the entire round. He's a self-taught developer and has been coding since he was 5 years old. In addition to leading the company, he also wrote the code for the MVP.

Dayra has started with a focus on gig workers who work as independent contractors for online platforms (think drivers of