• Egypt-based B2B marketplace for professional services UNLOCK, has raised a six-figure round led by UI Investments along with a group of angel investors. 
• Co-founded by Fady Younan and Mona El-Kheshen, UNLOCK connects companies to service vendors across multiple verticals including marketing, software development, accounting, and consultancy. 
• UNLOCK has served 600 companies to date, generating a turnover of more than $3 million dollars for its vendor partners.

Press release

UNLOCK, MENA’s first AI-powered and fintech-enabled B2B marketplace for professional services, is proud to announce the closure of a USD 6-figures angel investors’ round, led by Tarek Roushdy of UI Investments, together with a group of angel investors.

UNLOCK is transforming the way companies buy and sell professional services in the MENA region, making it quicker and easier for companies to find, work, pay and receive guaranteed services from marketing, software development, accounting, consultancy companies and more.

Clients use UNLOCK as their partner to find & work with trusted agencies through an easy process: clients fill in a service request, get matched within 1 day, receive up to 3 proposals, select an agency and get their service delivered, guaranteed.

Fady Younan, CEO & Co-Founder of UNLOCK, explains their offering “The UNLOCK Guarantee is a revolutionary concept in the region. For the first time, companies can easily find & hire the best agencies for their needs. The UNLOCK Guarantee has been welcomed by both clients and providers. Clients are guaranteed to get their service delivered on time and on scope while agencies are guaranteed to receive their money in full and on time, every time they successfully deliver a service.”

We are solving the inefficiencies in the services market by utilizing AI-powered technology to enable clients and agencies to find and work together easily and securely.”

Mona El-Kheshen, COO & Co-Founder of UNLOCK expands “Through UNLOCK, we aim to put structure to the services market and elevate the entire experience for both clients and agencies. Using AI technology, agencies build a higher UNLOCK score with every successful delivery, which helps them get matched with more service requests, whilst clients develop a reputation score to help them get better deals for future requests.”

The startup has been bootstrapping since its launch in December 2020 and has achieved impressive traction since then. UNLOCK has served as a procurement partner for more than 600 companies to date, generating business opportunities worth more than $3 million dollars for the agencies on its platform.

The idea for UNLOCK originally came through the Egyptian Professionals Network (EPN), which was co-founded in 2019 by Mona El-Kheshen and Fady Younan and quickly grew to become one of Egypt’s leading business networks. Through EPN, they realized the scale of the challenges facing the professional services market for both companies and services agencies and the potential to create a scalable solution for it.

Mona and Fady co-founded UNLOCK in December 2020, leveraring Fady’s 15 years’ experience in building technology solutions for the B2B sector as ex-CEO of e7gezly, the digital ticketing startup, and ex-Ericsson and Orange, and Mona’s 15 years’ marketing experience in building global brands with Johnson & Johnson and Cadbury Schweppes across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Over the coming months, UNLOCK will focus on developing its proprietary technology for AI-matching, procurement and payments whilst expanding their innovative UNLOCK Guarantee to thousands of companies.