Egypt-based mobile payments and loyalty platform Zeal Rewards, has closed an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

Founded in 2019 by Omar Ebeid, Bellal Mohamed, and Amr Mohamed Zeal offers QR code-based payment solutions to retailers and other offline businesses, including food and beverage outlets and beauty salons. 

The startup, incubated by UK-based SETsquared, aims to end fragmented in-store customer experiences including, long cashier queues and poor customer identification. Its QR technology enables merchants to collect better data regarding their customers and sales, and thus offer personalised rewards.Zeal’s payment experience is inspired by Apple Pay and allows users to connect a payment method to the Zeal app QR code and present it to a scanner in-store to pay and collect loyalty points in the same transaction.

"With financial inclusion prioritised by the Central Bank of Egypt and a population of 100 million, Zeal is bringing Egyptians a seamless and rewarding mobile payments experience. We are targeting multi-sited food and beverage outlets, beauty salons and barbershops that are serving affluent and tech-savvy consumers,” said Omar Ebeid, founder of Zeal.

With the new financing round, the startup will be able to grow its team and scale its operations in Egypt and the UK.

"The Zeal team has definitely shown their eagerness to tackle a global fintech and customer retention problem that every B2C enterprise faces. We look forward to their continued growth,” said Caroline Fleming, centre director at SETsquared Surrey.