London-based startup Dealfuze, co-founded by Egyptian entrepreneurs Mohamed Al Sheraie and Mostafa Zaghloul, is launching a venture discovery and investor-matching platform designed to connect startups across the Middle East and Africa with international and Gulf investors searching for early-stage deal flow.
The move comes as Africa’s startup ecosystem faces one of its most difficult funding climates in years.
After a decade of rapid venture capital growth, global investor pullbacks, rising interest rates and the retreat of several international accelerators have sharply reduced pre-seed funding availability across the continent, leaving thousands of founders struggling to access early capital.
At the same time, venture financing in Africa remains heavily concentrated.
More than 82% of African venture capital continues to flow into just four countries Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa, while pre-seed funding accounts for only 1.5% of total venture investment across the continent, according to figures cited by the company.
For founders operating outside major tech hubs, access to investors often depends less on business fundamentals and more on personal networks and proximity to established ecosystems.
Dealfuze is attempting to dismantle that structure.
Turning Venture Capital Matchmaking Into Infrastructure
The platform operates like a data-driven matching engine, pairing startups with investors based on sector focus, funding stage, geography and traction metrics rather than relying on traditional “warm introductions” that dominate venture capital culture.
Al Sheraie said, “The MEA region produced record venture capital activity in 2025, yet the founders who need capital most, at pre-seed and seed stages, outside the four dominant hubs, are still being left behind. We are building the infrastructure layer that makes venture discovery merit-driven and accessible across the region. Access to capital should be determined by the strength of your idea and the quality of your execution, not by geography or who you already know.”
The company argues that the region’s capital allocation problem is not caused by a lack of entrepreneurial activity, but by a fragmented connectivity infrastructure between founders and investors.
That fragmentation has become more visible as African entrepreneurship expands beyond fintech into sectors including climate technology, logistics, healthtech, agritech, artificial intelligence and industrial software.
While innovation activity across Africa and the Middle East continues to accelerate, funding pipelines remain uneven and highly relationship-driven.
The gender funding gap remains particularly severe.
Female founders across Africa secure only about 10% of equity funding despite accounting for more than one-third of applicants, according to figures referenced by Dealfuze.
That imbalance mirrors broader global venture capital disparities but is amplified in emerging markets where informal investment networks often dominate access to capital.
Zaghloul stated, “In 2025, 49% of MENA venture capital came from international investors, a five-year high, yet the vast majority of MEA founders never get in front of those investors simply because they lack the right introduction. Female founders across Africa receive just 10% of equity funding despite representing over a third of applicants. That is not a talent gap. That is a network gap. Dealfuze exists so that a founder in Nairobi, Casablanca, or Riyadh is discovered based on alignment and potential, not proximity. Access to capital should never depend on who you already know.”
By standardising startup profiles and automating investor discovery, Dealfuze believes it can lower some of the structural barriers that exclude underrepresented founders from venture conversations.
Africa’s Startup Funding Slowdown Creates New Market Opportunity
The launch comes during a major recalibration in African venture capital markets.
After record funding years between 2021 and 2023, startup investment activity across Africa slowed significantly as global investors shifted toward profitability, capital preservation and lower-risk markets.
Several international accelerators and early-stage investors reduced operations or exited parts of the continent altogether, creating what many ecosystem operators now describe as a “pre-seed vacuum.”
According to Dealfuze, private pre-seed funding capacity in Africa has contracted by more than 60% following the withdrawal of some international startup support programmes.
That funding squeeze has disproportionately affected first-time founders and startups outside major urban technology ecosystems.
The result is a growing disconnect between startup formation and startup financing.
Africa remains one of the world’s youngest and fastest-growing entrepreneurial regions, with digital adoption, mobile connectivity and financial inclusion continuing to expand rapidly across the continent.
Yet founders increasingly face a market where building a startup is often easier than accessing the relationships required to fund it.
Dealfuze is positioning itself as infrastructure for that gap.
How the Platform Works
The platform functions as a venture discovery marketplace where founders upload pitch decks that are then parsed into standardised “match cards” visible to investors.
Before startups become accessible to investors, Dealfuze runs a verification process to assess whether companies meet investor-readiness standards.
The goal is to improve signal quality in a venture market often overwhelmed by fragmented information and inconsistent startup documentation.
Once both founders and investors express mutual interest, the platform opens direct communication channels to facilitate meetings and investment discussions.
The company is also exploring subscription-based revenue streams alongside AI-driven token consumption models tied to platform usage.
Over time, Dealfuze plans to integrate live operational, financial and social data into startup profiles, creating more dynamic investment intelligence systems for venture firms evaluating emerging-market opportunities.
The broader implication is significant.
As artificial intelligence increasingly reshapes financial services and investment sourcing globally, platforms capable of organising fragmented startup ecosystems into searchable, investable data layers may become critical infrastructure for emerging-market capital formation.
“AI has made building easier than ever. The challenge now is filtering the real signal from the enormous noise,” said Mahmoud Al Anany, CTO at Dealfuze. “As MEA VC hit record levels in 2025, the bottleneck shifted from capital availability to capital connectivity. Knowing which founders merit which investors’ attention, across more than 50 countries, dozens of sectors, and thousands of mandates, is fundamentally an infrastructure problem. Dealfuze is designed for exactly that middle layer of venture discovery.”
Gulf Capital Eyes African and Middle Eastern Growth
The timing of Dealfuze’s launch also reflects intensifying Gulf interest in African and Middle Eastern startup ecosystems.
Investors from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have become increasingly active across African technology markets as Gulf sovereign wealth funds, family offices and venture firms seek higher-growth opportunities beyond saturated Western markets.
The platform’s first major public showcase an algorithmically curated digital demo day co-hosted with regional tech community Builders Tribe on May 20, highlights that strategy.
Participating startups include Saudi Arabian proptech company Darent alongside institutional investors such as Shorooq Partners, Blossom Capital and Launch Africa Ventures.
Investment ticket sizes are expected to range from $50,000 to more than $1 million.
The involvement of Gulf and international investors reflects a broader shift underway in global venture capital.
Africa and the Middle East are increasingly being viewed not as frontier side markets, but as interconnected high-growth regions tied together by demographics, mobile-first consumers, infrastructure gaps and digital transformation opportunities.
The Bigger Bet: Democratising Access to Venture Capital
The real test for Dealfuze will not simply be whether it can facilitate startup-investor introductions.
It will be whether it can challenge one of venture capital’s oldest structural realities: that access often matters as much as innovation.
In emerging ecosystems, founders without elite educational backgrounds, accelerator affiliations or insider networks frequently struggle to enter serious funding conversations regardless of traction or product quality.
That dynamic has historically limited who gets funded and ultimately which problems get solved.
If platforms like Dealfuze succeed, they could begin shifting venture capital from a relationship economy toward a more data-driven discovery economy.
For African and Middle Eastern entrepreneurship ecosystems, that transition could prove transformative.
Because in regions where millions of entrepreneurs remain locked out of traditional investment circles, access itself may be the next major infrastructure opportunity.
