The Food Lab, Egypt’s cloud kitchen operator, raises pre-seed round of $4.5m

The Food Lab (TFL), Egypt’s first cloud kitchen services operator, has completed a substantial $4.5m pre-seed funding round. Nuwa Capital, Shorooq Partners, and 4DX Ventures co-led the round, which comprised investors from all across the world. Saudi Arabia’s Al Faisaliah Group and Abdul Majeed Al Hokair, as well as Japan’s Samurai Incubate and other angel investors, participated in the pre-seed round.

Established in 2020 by Egyptian entrepreneurs Kareem El Daly, Ahmed Osman, and Wesam Masoud, TFL has partnered with over 50 local and international brands who are leveraging the company’s platform to grow their presence in Egypt.

Kareem El Daly, founder and president of The Food Lab, said, “Our mission is to bridge the gap between restaurants and consumers, and by building technology infrastructure, we are enabling the transformation of Egypt’s Food and Beverage (F&B) industry. Restaurants powered by The Food Lab can expand quickly, without any capital commitment, while strengthening their brand equity. Our tech infrastructure helps our clients make data-driven decisions whilst delivering Egypt’s highest level of service excellence to the largest number of people. Additionally, customers can benefit from easy access to their favourite restaurants. Together with our investors, we look forward to accelerating a new phase of growth for the F&B industry.”

TFL’s cloud kitchen is powered by a proprietary technology platform that offers end-to-end restaurant services such as procurement, cooking, delivery, and marketing. The platform’s virtual brand consultant, which is powered by machine learning, offers restaurants with a data-centric dashboard that delivers advice for their brands in areas such as operations, finance, menu reengineering, marketing, supplier research, and more.

Ahmed Osman, co-founder and CEO of The Food Lab, said, “Together with our new investors, we look forward to building on our leadership position to expand across Egypt. Job creation in the form of strategic hires remains a key priority alongside the further development of our technology.”

The TFL platform enables scalable growth opportunities for restaurants through a technology-based platform. TFL’s technology transforms restaurants into data-driven enterprises, centralising company data in one simple platform. Restaurant managers can easily access reporting and benchmarking tools, and insights platform, customer segmentation and marketing tools, and measure growth against industry KPIs.

Ghassan Noursi, venture lead, Nuwa Capital, said, “The Food Lab is offering restaurant owners a solution to the problems posed by the country’s recent trend of de-urbanisation, which makes it very difficult for a restaurant to reach any meaningful percentage of a given population. TFL’s founders have really put together an amazing team to help the company scale nationwide, and their singular commitment to improving customer satisfaction is one that I am confident will lead to an ever-improving product stack.”