The availability of different forms of payment and providers is one of the reasons why businesses in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region have operational challenges in revenue management and collection.
These businesses often use outdated methods, such as Excel spreadsheets, to keep track of these collections, especially subscription-based ones, or build in-house automation systemstherefore,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.
Sub base, a no/low code platform, helps such businesses and removes their overhead by managing the complete 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 include 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 serving the MENA region. The cloud-based platform helps subscription and recurring revenue-based businesses with the collection, processing, analytics, invoicing and billing tools to effectively manage their customers.
According to a statement shared with TechCrunch, SubsBase’s operating system allows customers to simplify and keep information organized and tasks clear, integrate multiple third-party software applications, and automate subscription billing and invoicing.
“The problem that these businesses face, even the huge corporate accounts, is that they have a lot of people doing all the work manually and the data gets delayed a week or two from the date of the actual payments, and that leads to lost revenue.” , co-founder and CEO Mohamed Farag said during a conversation with TechCrunch. “So once we step in, we solve those problems by giving them a single tool and platform to use where everything is aggregated and in real-time, allowing them to see and have a more visible outcome of their business, but also predict what will happen happen and focus on their product instead of everything [those] operating headaches.
The CEO said SubsBase provides its platform to various customer segments and verticals. They are startups and SMEs (which he describes as the company’s sweet spot because of their pure SaaS business) and other businesses such as lenders, insurance companies, real estate companies and recurring payment e-commerce companies. Some of its clients include Clakett, Mermaid, OLX and Zammit.
SubsBase has grown 200% month-over-month since officially launching more than a year ago, said Farag, who founded the company with Chief Business Officer Sherif Aziz in 2020. On the call, the founders indicated that in addition to “SubsBase running on SubsBase” , the platform also uses a subscription-based business model; there are three different flat fee plans that customers can choose from. Customers are also charged different transaction fees for each plan.
Similar providers exist in the US and Europe, including massive platforms like Chargebee and Recurly. If any of these platforms expand into MENA, they will need to integrate with the likes of Fawry, Paymob and PayTabs, 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 own regulation and requirements, makes such an expansion plan seem unlikely, and as such, SubsBase enjoys little to no competition in the region at present.
“By being localized and as a first mover, we will be able to help these businesses grow and scale in the market, as well as be able to take care of their future needs when they decide to go to other countries or expand their operations in other countries. And then from there, we’re going to grow our subscription base as well as enable more businesses to grow,” Farag commented.
Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the regions where SubsBase wishes to serve businesses. The CEO said the presence of pan-African investor Ingressive Capital – Egypt’s first fund – in the capital pool would facilitate such plans.
With this new investment, the company also aims to increase commercial and branding efforts in MENA. It is hiring for its operational sales, direct sales team, customer success team and business development team, as well as increasing its marketing and content output, including educational content and podcasts, as it educates the market about the subscription economy and how it works.
“We’re increasing the team and resources to be able to meet the demands we’re seeing across the region,” Aziz said on the call. “We’re prioritizing issues in a way that helps them grow and catalyze the no-code feature market on one side of seamlessly integrating with other no-code platforms so that people can and are encouraged to start building businesses with subscription models.” “
General partner at Global Ventures, Noor Sweid, outlining the reasons why the subscription management and recurring billing platform was backed, said his firm saw an attractive and unique value proposition that extended beyond subscription services to include an end-to-end and a convenient platform for managing any recurring payments, from small subscriptions to car loans.
“We are excited to support Mohamed and the team in their journey to build the first subscription management platform for the region,” he added.