Money Fellows' gameya bet: digitizing Egypt's money circles to $1.5B in transactions

Money Fellows' founding bet was that Egyptians would trust an app to run the gameya — the rotating savings circle households have run informally for generations — if it made the practice safer and regulated. Co-founder Ahmed Wadi saw the gap working in finance in Germany, watching immigrants reconstruct the same circles abroad with no digital equivalent. Founded in Cairo in 2016 with Adham Badr, the company turned the gameya into a managed product: users join a circle, pay a fixed monthly contribution, and receive the pot when their turn comes, with transparent rules and zero service fees.

The model scaled on cultural familiarity rather than financial education. By October 2022 Money Fellows had hundreds of thousands of monthly active users and 8x year-on-year growth, closing the first $31M of a Series B led by CommerzVentures, MEVP and Arzan VC, with Partech, Sawari Ventures, 4DX and P1Ventures alongside. The company then layered products onto the same base: a prepaid card issued with Banque Misr, more than 40 physical distribution points across Egypt, and 328 B2B2C partnerships with employers and institutions.

In April 2025, DPI Venture Capital's Nclude Fund and Al Mada Ventures co-led a $13M round with existing investors Partech and CommerzVentures, pushing total funding past $60M and funding a move into Morocco as the gateway to North Africa. By October 2025 the platform reported over 8 million users, roughly 350,000 monthly actives, more than 2 million completed circles and $1.5 billion in cumulative transaction value — and said it had reached profitability.

The company runs under the Central Bank of Egypt's fintech regulatory sandbox, which gives the digitized circle formal standing, and describes its mission as financial inclusion through a practice Egyptians already understand. The open question is whether the gameya model travels: Morocco is the first test of whether a savings loop rooted in one country's social norms can become a pan-African fintech.