Sylndr, with fresh $15.7M, allows users to buy, sell, finance, and service used cars in Egypt

Summary

Cairo-based Sylndr has raised $15.7 million as it expands beyond online used car sales into auto financing, servicing, and tools for dealers. The round was led by Development Partners International’s Nclude Fund and included follow-on investments from Algebra Ventures and Nclude. The company, which operates in Egypt’s fast-growing but under-digitized vehicle market, said the latest round includes both fresh equity and previously unannounced seed financing. Sylndr also raised nearly $10 million in debt financing from local banks in the past year, bringing its total raised since launch to over $30 million. Sylndr raised a $12.6 million pre-seed round in 2022. Omar El Defrawy and Amr Mazen, former executives at local food delivery and e-commerce startups, founded the used cars platform in 2021 and initially focused on buying used cars directly from consumers, refurbishing them, and reselling them with a warranty and money-back guarantee. It has since evolved into a broader mobility platform, offering digital auto loans, car servicing, and a marketplace for third-party dealers. “When we started the business, we were primarily focused on a consumer problem related to buying and selling cars,” said co-founder and CEO Omar El Defrawy in an interview with TechCrunch. “And when we started to scale that business, it became very clear to us that the market is much bigger than that, and creating value to customers would require us to build other compelling businesses that integrate with what we’re doing.” Egypt has over 6 million cars on the road, with demand for used cars growing amid currency devaluation and rising prices for new imports. In 2021, the government banned used car imports, forcing the market to rely entirely on domestic inventory, driving prices to mirror the exchange rate. As a result, used cars in Egypt, while outnumbering new vehicles by 3:1, are primarily sold through unregulated dealerships or classified websites, where informal transactions leave buyers ca...