Egypt has built one of Africa’s most active fintech ecosystems. What it has not yet built is a reliable route from venture capital to the public markets.
MNT-Halan, Egypt’s first fintech unicorn, raised $157.5mn from international investors in 2024, including $40mn from the International Finance Corporation. Thndr, meanwhile, has raised almost $38mn and by early 2026 had become the Egyptian Exchange’s largest brokerage by market share.
Yet neither built its growth story through EGX. That raises an increasingly important question for Egypt’s digital economy: if private investors are willing to finance its fastest-growing technology companies, what would make the domestic stock market a compelling source of their next round of capital?
The capital exists. The bridge remains incomplete.
Private Capital Has Already Built the Sector
Egypt’s fintech ecosystem has expanded rapidly. The number of fintech start-ups and payment-service providers reached 177, according to industry data cited by the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, a 5.5-fold increase over five years. Egypt also accounted for 35% of African fintech funding in the cited 2024 dataset.
MNT-Halan illustrates how far private capital can take an Egyptian technology business. Its $157.5mn financing round in July 2024 included IFC, Development Partners International, Lorax Capital Partners, funds managed by Apis Partners, Lunate and GB Corp. The company has since expanded beyond Egypt into markets including Türkiye, Pakistan and the UAE.
Thndr represents another side of the transformation. By early 2026, the investment platform had surpassed 5.5mn downloads and roughly 700,000 funded accounts. Its brokerage business captured 12.9% of EGX trading, making it the exchange’s largest broker by market share.
There is an irony here. One of Egypt’s fastest-growing fintech companies is bringing a new generation of investors into the stock market while companies from the same technology ecosystem have largely relied on private capital to finance their own expansion.
Why Go Public When Private Capital Is Available?
The obstacle is not simply regulation.
Venture-backed technology companies typically spend years prioritising customer acquisition, technology, market share and geographic expansion over near-term earnings. Private investors can value those businesses around expected growth, unit economics and future cash generation.
Public markets impose a different discipline.
EGX listing requirements generally include financial-track-record, shareholder, free-float, disclosure and governance conditions. For investors, those safeguards matter. For rapidly expanding companies, however, public ownership also brings continuous disclosure, market scrutiny and an observable valuation every trading day.
That creates a more fundamental question than whether a technology company can list: why should it?
If founders can raise sufficient private capital at attractive valuations while retaining greater strategic flexibility, another private round may be more appealing than an IPO. EGX therefore has to compete for issuers as well as regulate them.
Egypt’s Financial Regulatory Authority has been trying to narrow the gap. Regulatory changes have sought to improve access for newly established and growth companies while preserving governance and investor protections.
The policy challenge is consequently not to make listing easy at any cost. It is to make public capital sufficiently attractive without weakening the standards on which market credibility depends.
Fawry Proved It Could Be Done
Egypt already has an important precedent.
Fawry’s 2019 flotation demonstrated that an Egyptian technology-led financial-services company could reach the public market and subsequently attract substantial investor interest. The company later became Egypt’s first billion-dollar technology company by market value.
But Fawry is important for another reason: its success did not immediately produce a pipeline of comparable technology flotations.
That is the central problem. Egypt has demonstrated that a fintech can become a major listed company. It has yet to demonstrate that the process can be repeated consistently across a generation of venture-backed businesses.
Valu Proved Fintech Can List — but Not Yet the Financing Model
Valu provided the next major test.
The consumer-finance company began trading on EGX in June 2025 after parent EFG Holding distributed 20.488% of Valu’s share capital to its shareholders as an in-kind dividend. Amazon acquired a 3.95% direct stake when trading began.
But Valu was not a conventional primary IPO raising fresh capital to finance expansion.
That distinction is crucial.
Valu demonstrated that EGX can provide public ownership, liquidity and price discovery for a modern Egyptian fintech. It did not demonstrate that the exchange could provide the primary growth capital that might otherwise have come from venture capital or private equity.
For Egypt, therefore, the relevant measure is not simply how many technology companies reach the exchange. It is how many can use the exchange to raise growth capital — and return to it for additional financing as they expand.
That is when EGX would cease to function primarily as a listing or exit venue for technology companies and become part of the sector’s financing infrastructure.
MNT-Halan Could Be the Real Test
That test may now be approaching.
MNT-Halan has been considering a potential flotation of its Egyptian business on EGX. Reports in June said Citi and EFG Hermes were working with the company on a possible transaction that would value the domestic operation at roughly $900mn-$1bn. Its businesses elsewhere would remain outside the proposed listed entity.
No final IPO decision has been announced.
The process nevertheless appears to have advanced. Reports in August said founder and chief executive Mounir Nakhla had held discussions with EGX and FRA officials over a possible listing.
If completed, its significance would extend beyond adding another stock to the exchange.
MNT-Halan would test whether Egypt can move a business financed substantially through international private capital into domestic public ownership after reaching unicorn scale.
More importantly, the structure of any transaction would matter. A flotation dominated by existing shareholders selling stakes would provide liquidity and an exit. A meaningful primary issuance, by contrast, would demonstrate that EGX can supply fresh capital for a technology company’s next stage of growth.
That is a much harder — and more important — test.
The Missing Ingredient May Be the Buyer
Listing rules are only one side of a functioning technology market. Someone must be willing to buy the shares.
A sustainable technology IPO market requires liquidity, domestic institutions, foreign investors, research coverage and investors capable of valuing businesses whose economics may differ substantially from those of banks, property developers and industrial companies.
Technology companies often require investors to price future scale against present profitability. That becomes difficult when market liquidity is concentrated in established sectors or investors place a heavy premium on current earnings and dividends.
This is why simply relaxing listing requirements cannot create a technology market.
Other exchanges have confronted similar problems by adapting market architecture. Shanghai’s STAR Market, for example, created alternative routes for innovative companies that may not satisfy conventional earnings tests. Egypt does not necessarily need to replicate that model, but the experience illustrates a broader principle: attracting growth companies requires an investor ecosystem capable of valuing them, not merely regulatory permission to list.
Public markets nevertheless offer something private capital cannot easily reproduce at scale: liquidity, continuous price discovery and access to a much broader pool of institutional and retail capital.
The question is whether EGX can make those advantages valuable enough for Egypt’s technology companies to choose the public market.
From Exceptions to a Pipeline
Egypt does not need to prove that a fintech company can trade on EGX. Fawry and Valu have already done that.
The next test is whether the exchange can become a recurring source of capital for companies emerging from Egypt’s venture ecosystem.
MNT-Halan alone would not settle the question. What matters is what follows: whether another venture-backed technology company lists after it; whether companies raise fresh capital rather than merely provide exits for existing shareholders; whether institutional investors participate; and whether those companies can subsequently return to the market for additional equity.
That would transform individual transactions into a financing pipeline.
Egypt has already demonstrated that it can produce technology businesses capable of attracting international capital. Its next challenge is to build a domestic public market capable of competing for those companies as they mature.
Until that transition becomes repeatable, Egypt’s digital economy risks continuing to develop faster than the public market designed to finance its growth.
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