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Bekia, an Egyptian startup digitising waste collection, has raised $765k in Seed funding to deepen its consumer app and launch its first business-to-business software product.
The funding round was led by Madica, the Africa-focused investment programme affiliated with Flourish Ventures, with participation from Catalyst Fund, the pan-African climate investor that first backed Bekia in 2023, and Dakar-based Jambaar Capital.
“What excites us about Bekia is how the team is drawing on its firsthand understanding of waste collection in Egypt to build a more interconnected, tech-driven ecosystem serving households, small businesses and large industrial waste producers. We’re proud to welcome them to the Madica program and support that ambition with long-term capital, company-building expertise and networks,” said Emmanuel Adegboye, Head of Madica.
Founded in 2019 by Alaa Afifi, a computer science graduate of Cairo University, Bekia began as a small, tech-driven initiative to help households exchange recyclables for rewards, before growing into a digital platform connecting individuals, businesses, and recyclers. The company is rethinking waste management across Africa and the Middle East by connecting consumers and businesses to trusted recycling channels, using technology, data and incentives to make recycling simple, rewarding and traceable.
The consumer experience is built on four steps: users sort recyclables such as plastic, paper, metal, and e-waste; request a pickup or drop-off through the Bekia app; earn points instantly, redeemable for cash, discounts, or essential goods; and Bekia processes the materials for resale or reuse.
A household books a pickup, a collector arrives at the scheduled time, the material is weighed on the spot at a published rate, and payment is sent to a bank account or digital wallet. Bekia says it now has more than 100,000 active users across Egypt, over 100 strategic factory partnerships, and more than 400 partnerships with established companies.
It has diverted more than 25,000 tonnes of waste from landfill and served over 100,000 customers, 97% of them women, with more than 2,400 people earning through its network.
“Egypt’s recycling sector has always worked — it just worked invisibly, on cash and trust, with no record of any of it,” said Afifi, founder and CEO of Bekia. “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.”
Bekia will use the funding to grow its engineering team, take its first B2B product, Bekia Next, to market, and begin testing its model in a second African country. Scheduled to launch at the end of October, Bekia Next will be its first subscription product, designed to turn collection records into verified CO2-avoidance certificates for corporate clients using an established carbon-accounting methodology.
“We were among the earliest investors to believe in Alaa and his vision for transforming Egypt’s recycling ecosystem. 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.
The raise lands in a market that remains largely informal. Egypt produces about 60,000 tonnes of municipal waste a day, most of it going to open dumps, and nearly all of today’s collection runs through an informal trade without contracts, licences or records.
As reporting obligations tighten on multinationals operating in Egypt and the country targets 60% recycling rate by 2027, Afifi expects companies able to prove what became of their waste to be worth more than those that simply hauled it away.
