Cairo-based online real estate platform Sakneen announced today that it has been backed by Y Combinator. The startup was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch that graduated earlier this year with a virtual demo day. It has raised USD 150,000 from Y Combinator as part of joining the program.
Breadfast and Trella are the two other Egyptian startups that recently graduated from Y Combinator. Both of them were part of YC S19.
Founded in late 2019 by Ramy Khorshed and Hussein El Kheshen, Sakneen is building an online real estate platform that will make it easier for developers, agents, and individuals to buy and sell properties, mainly homes.
“We’re looking to reinvent the real estate process. Standing in the way of a better real estate experience is disorganized public information, mismatched incentives in the sales process, and a lack of transparency around financials. Sakneen is building the technology that will help tackle all three with the vision of turning the struggle of finding a home into joy for millions of homebuyers,” the two co-founders wrote in a blog.
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Sakneen’s platform, which is still in the works, is expected to launch later this year. The company’s business model, for now, is to charge a monthly fee from developers and agents using its platform, the company’s co-founder and CEO Ramy Khorshed told MENAbytes, adding that they will also look into the possibility of monetizing transactions in the future.
Individuals looking to buy homes will be able to search through the platform’s inventory, which will have both primary and secondary properties, using Sakneen’s own search engine. The startup said it will not feature paid ads or listings.
Speaking to MENAbytes about their participation in YC’s accelerator program, Hussein El Kheshen, the co-founder and CTO of Sakneen, said, “Being part of Y Combintor was a truly great experience for us as founders and a company. It was great to have a lot of contact with different mentors and significant figures from Silicon Valley, who provided us with tailored advice to make sure that the product we’re building was the best possible product and that the decisions we were taking were mitigating the mistakes that other founders had made in the past.”
Aaron Epstein, a partner at Y Combinator, said in a statement, “At YC, we help talented founders from anywhere in the world to access the advice, network, and funding that Silicon Valley has to offer. With Sakneen, we see dedicated founders, tackling a huge problem, in a region of the world that has tons of opportunity for tech investment. It was an obvious decision to fund them and pleasure for us to support them.”
There are two more regional startups that were part of Y Combinator’s W20 batch.
This article first appeared on MENAbytes.