Businesses in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have trouble managing revenue and getting paid because there are many ways to pay and many suppliers to pay.
Companies that track subscription and recurring revenue by hand using Excel or custom-built automation systems miss out on important data, which leads to lost revenue and inefficiencies like hiring more accountants than necessary to handle collections.
What is SubsBase?
SubsBase is a low/no-code platform that aids these organizations by handling the entire subscription life cycle, including billing, payments, and notifications, with no effort on their part. A seed investment round of $2.4 million was led by Global Ventures, a venture capital firm that focuses on the Middle East and Africa.
Falak Startups and Arzan Venture Capital, who had already invested, as well as HALA Ventures, P1 Ventures, Plus Venture Capital (+VC), Plug and Play, Ingressive Capital, and Camel Ventures, who had never invested before, joined the round.
What is SubsBase used for?
SubsBase says it is the only platform for managing subscriptions and recurring income in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
The operating system of SubsBase makes data and tasks easier to understand, integrates third-party software, and automates subscription billing and invoicing.
The challenges they face
Co-founder and CEO Mohamed Farag said, “The problem these businesses face, even huge enterprise accounts, is that they have many people doing all the work manually, and data is delayed one or two weeks from the date of actual payments, and that leads to a loss of revenue.” “Once we step in, we solve these issues by providing them with a unified platform and set of tools where everything is aggregated and real-time, so they can not only see and have a more visible impact on their business but also predict what will happen and concentrate on their product rather than all of [those] operational headaches.”
According to the company’s CEO, SubsBase serves various industries using its platform. This group includes businesses that rely on recurring payments, such as lenders, insurers, real estate firms, and online retailers, as well as startups and SMEs (which he calls the company’s sweet spot due to their primarily SaaS businesses). Clakett, Mermaid, OLX, and Zammit are just a few of their customers.
Read also: Egypt’s Mylerz Raises $9.6M For Africa-Wide Growth
The growth of SubsBase
Since its official introduction a little over a year ago, SubsBase has grown by 200% month over month, according to Farag, who co-founded the company with chief business officer Sherif Aziz in 2020. In addition to saying that “SubsBase runs on SubsBase,” the platform’s creators also said that it is based on a subscription-based business model and has three service levels with different prices. Different transaction fees are assessed to customers for using different plans.
Many similar service providers in the US and Europe, like Chargebee and Recurly, were already mentioned. If any of these services were to enter the MENA market, they would need to connect with local payment processors like Fawry, Paymob, and PayTabs, in addition to global services like Stripe and PayPal, which are included on the SubsBase platform. Still, because payments are very localized and each area has its own rules and requirements, this kind of growth seems unlikely, and SubsBase doesn’t have much competition in the area right now.
Because we were the first to do what we do and focus on localisation, we will be in a good position to help these companies grow in the market and meet their needs if they decide to grow internationally. “After that, we’ll be able to help more businesses expand, and we’ll have more subscribers,” Farag said.
SubsBase plans for the future
SubsBase wants to help businesses worldwide, including those in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the fund’s CEO, the fund’s first investment in Egypt, pan-African firm Ingressive Capital, will help move these objectives forward.
The company’s investment would also help it sell more and build its brand name in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It’s expanding production in marketing and content, such as educational content and podcasts, to educate the market on the subscription economy and how it works; it’s also hiring for operational sales, direct sales team, customer success team, and business development team.
Aziz added on the call, “We are growing the team and resources to be able to cater to the demands we are seeing across the region.” As the company’s website puts it, “We prioritise problems in a way that helps them grow and catalyse the market with no-code features from one side of integration with other no-code platforms seamlessly so that people can and are encouraged to start building businesses with subscription models.”
Noor Sweid, a general partner at Global Ventures, explained why his company decided to invest in a platform to manage subscriptions and other types of recurring billing. He said that the platform’s unique and attractive value proposition goes beyond subscription services and makes it easy to manage recurring payments, from small subscriptions to car loans.
To that end, he continued, “we are thrilled to back Mohamed and the team on their journey toward building the first subscription management platform for the region.”
