Egypt’s bluworks raised $1 M Pre-seed funding from VC firm Khawarizmi Ventures
Khawarizmi Ventures, a Saudi venture capital firm, led the $1 million pre-Seed investment round led by bluworks, an Egyptian startup that develops blue-collar HRTech SaaS solutions. A group of angel investors, Camel Ventures, and Acasia Ventures also participated in the funding round.
Farah Osman, Hussein Wahdan, and Nour Ahmadein founded bluworks in 2022. It is the only HRTech SaaS platform in the area that is dedicated to managing the lifecycle of workers in blue-collar industries, including retail, food and beverage, facility management, healthcare, education, and construction. In the end, this entails automating different HR and operational duties to assist businesses in cost optimization and data-driven decision-making.
For businesses that hire blue-collar workers, bluworks provides an integrated platform that connects operations, HR, and the workforce in order to aggregate and gather data points.
Over 50 million blue-collar workers reside in the Middle East and Africa. Blue-collar hires’ performance and attendance data are currently gathered manually by a number of departments across businesses using various automated and manual systems. A very routine task, like payroll calculation for these workers, becomes extremely difficult and complex for companies because blue-collar workers’ work conditions are very dynamic and can vary from day to day.
“With so many HR softwares on the market, not one is built to manage blue-collar workers,” Wahdan explains. “Since the process of managing this type of workforce is so manual, errors frequently occur, leading to penalties and deducted salaries with no oversight from the workers, causing them to leave and ultimately contributing to high turnover rates. Currently, companies can spend about 7-10 days just closing their payroll accounts, but with bluworks, this time can be cut down to one day – all while leveraging data and insights on their workforce.”
Thousands of blue-collar workers are currently managed by bluworks on its platform, which is utilized by tens of clients like Crave, Qahwa, and Cilantro. With intentions to diversify into other industries like manufacturing, construction, and facility management, the company is currently concentrating on the retail and food and beverage sectors.
“Having a strong workforce is integral to building and fortifying sustainable businesses,” Osman says. “We are excited about getting strategic investors on-board that can provide us with access to both local and regional markets, to which we are looking to expand. There is no shortage of industry use cases similar to Egypt around the world, and we are eager to tackle them with our innovative workforce management solutions.”
“Egypt has one of the largest workforce populations in the MENA and Africa region; however, there are very few software solutions that are truly localised,” Venture Partner at Khwarizmii Ventures Ameer Sherif notes. “Like with many emerging markets, solutions to automate workforce management are still lacking. We believe that the bluworks team has the right mix of local understanding, and commercial and technical capability to lead this space in Egypt and later in other regional markets.”
