Money Fellows took an old savings habit and built a business the hard way

The global tech industry likes an old habit best when it can kill it. Cash is going. Brick-and-mortar branches are finished. The informal economy is waiting to be formalised, and all it takes is a platform and a convincing pitch.

That was Ahmed Wadi’s proposition in 2016. Egyptians already had a way to save and borrow. They pooled money, took turns collecting it, and relied on social obligation to keep everyone paying. The arrangement had survived without venture capital funding or a credit engine that powers modern finance.

Perhaps it deserved an upgrade.

Ten years after Wadi began building Money Fellows, an Egyptian fintech, much of its work has involved discovering how difficult that idea becomes when participants no longer know one another.

And, having attracted over one million registrations, the company has only recently taken its model beyond Egypt, into Morocco, with ambitions to explore more markets in the coming years.

Looking at Africa’s fintech ecosystem in the past decade, there are faster ways to grow a company’s operating markets. But Wadi wanted to understand the business first.

“We were very focused on really understanding and cracking the model on a local scale before we start distracting ourselves and launching other countries,” he recalled in an interview with TechCabal.

This sounds sensible. It also sounds considerably easier in retrospect.

An old habit, a new business

Money Fellows began with a problem Wadi encountered while living in Germany: accessing credit without an established local credit history. Back in Egypt, friends and families had long solved similar problems through gameya, the local version of a rotating savings and credit association.

It is very straightforward. Ten people contribute the same amount monthly. One receives the entire amount. The following month, someone else receives it. After ten months, everyone has collected once.

The model is common across Africa, including in East Africa, where savings groups known as chamas use a similar arrangement.

The person paid first has effectively borrowed against future contributions. The person paid last has saved through instalments. Between them are people planning a wedding, paying school fees, or making a purchase that will not wait for their salary to catch up.

He began working on the idea with a close friend alongside their jobs. It was their third startup together. In 2024, an accelerator placement at Startupbootcamp FinTech, a global network of industry-focused accelerators, took Wadi to London; his co-founder could not relocate with him.

London offered Wadi communities familiar with savings circles, something Germany could not. But the approach differed along ethnic lines. African communities organised their circles one way. Indian participants sometimes bid for their turn, while Arab participants agreed the order in advance.

Pooling money was common, but the rules varied.

During a visit home, Wadi took a booth at a startup event in Egypt to introduce Money Fellows to attendees. Describing it as gameya online—an online savings circle—was enough for people to understand the proposition. Their questions concerned trust, regulation, and payment channels, rather than how the savings model worked.

For Wadi, those conversations suggested Egypt offered customers who already understood the arrangement he wanted to digitise.

These were substantial questions. At least they were questions about using the product.

Wadi receives the Best Startup Award in the fintech category at the Startup Awards ceremony in India on May 3, 2024. Image source: Money Fellows

Trust beyond family

Building in Egypt meant working with an existing habit rather than financing the education of an entirely new market. Yet the old system’s most important feature was also the hardest to reproduce.

“People have always been used to do it with friends and family and aunts and uncles and neighbours,” Wadi said. On his platform, “people don’t necessarily need to know each other”.

That change expanded the potential pool of participants. It also transferred responsibility. If a stranger failed to contribute, a customer would have little interest in hearing that the app had successfully connected them.

Money Fellows says it assesses participants’ ability to pay and covers missed contributions to ensure other members receive their payouts. That convenience can sometimes come with an obligation on the company’s own finances.

In the early years, Egypt had no dedicated rules for digital savings circles, according to Wadi. Money Fellows had to work with regulators to develop a framework while persuading customers to entrust their savings to a platform that lacked a clear regulatory stamp of approval.

“You’re building something with so much passion every day that you have the risk of being shut down at any point,” he said.

The company relied on keeping its promises and on satisfied customers recommending it. Referrals could carry reassurance that advertising could only purchase the appearance of. But they took time.

A founder adapting a successful foreign business has a useful opening argument: it works elsewhere. Wadi had a familiar financial practice, but no equivalent company whose success could settle questions about his particular approach.

“No regulations, no benchmark, no success stories,” he said.

At points, Money Fellows struggled to raise enough money to sustain its operations. Investors were wary of backing a business without a clear regulatory framework or successful examples elsewhere to demonstrate that its model could work. Wadi sold personal possessions to keep it going, while the company cut staff to reduce costs.

Outside capital eventually gave the business room to develop. In June 2020, Money Fellows raised $4 million from Partech and Sawari Ventures. The announcement put its verified active user base above 150,000 and already discussed expansion across Africa. In October 2022, a $31 million Series B first close brought backing from CommerzVentures, Middle East Venture Partners and Arzan Venture Capital, among others.

Expansion across Africa and Asia remained the ambition, but Wadi wanted to establish that the model worked in Egypt before taking it elsewhere. Each new market would require Money Fellows to understand local savings habits, find suitable banking partners and establish a regulatory path. Morocco is its first test of that approach.

Expansion across Africa and Asia remained the ambition, but Wadi wanted to establish that the model worked in Egypt before taking it elsewhere. Image source: Money Fellows.

Making the circles pay

The delay in expanding beyond Egypt explains Money Fellows’ decade. Wadi says the company chose to grow carefully. It also needed to work out how to make each savings circle profitable before taking the model abroad.

More users did not necessarily mean a more profitable business. Early withdrawals attracted fees, while users who waited could receive incentives. If too many chose the later slots, the incentives could eat into the fees.

The breakthrough, Wadi said, was to determine whether each circle made money, rather than looking at each customer individually.

“If you oversell the ones with incentives versus the fee, the economics change,” he said.

The calculation was more important than the founder’s ambition. Money Fellows had to decide which circles to open, which slots to offer, and how to fill them. The fees had to cover incentives, the cost of attracting customers and processing payments, and losses from missed contributions.

Assessing borrowers was another challenge. Wadi said Money Fellows initially lacked access to the credit data other lenders used. It built its own system using information such as browsing behaviour, the type of phone a customer owned, and their location.

Removing the need for participants to know each other created a considerable need for the platform to know them.

By May 2025, another $13 million funding round, co-led by Al Mada Ventures and DPI Venture Capital through the Nclude Fund, brought total investment to more than $60 million, according to investor Partech. The announcement reported more than 8.5 million users.

In October 2025, Money Fellows reported around 350,000 monthly active users, more than $1.5 billion in cumulative transaction value and over two million completed savings groups. The company also says it is profitable.

The test beyond Egypt

After this success, the next question was whether this model could travel across the border.

In April 2026, Money Fellows and Wafacash, a financial services subsidiary of Morocco’s Attijariwafa Bank Group, announced a partnership to digitise the country’s daret savings system, following regulatory approvals from Bank Al-Maghrib. Wafacash brought local infrastructure, distribution and customer relationships. Money Fellows brought the technology developed through its Egyptian operation.

Wadi sees cultural similarity as one attraction. He also wanted to spread the company’s exposure after experiencing currency devaluations in Egypt. An investor with local connections helped make Morocco a practical choice.

The approach reflects a lesson he wishes he had learnt earlier: a banking partner’s quality and incentives matter from the beginning. In Morocco, he said, the company arranged a partnership with financial interests more closely aligned with its own.

Money Fellows co-founder and CEO Ahmed Wadi. Image source: TechAfrica.

He wants the first expansion to yield a method applicable elsewhere. Broader expansion could follow from the end of 2027, he said, once the company is comfortable with the experience.

There is a temptation to make all this a vindication of patience. Wadi’s own assessment is less tidy.

Asked what he would change, he said he would assemble stronger partners earlier. He would pay more attention to banking relationships. And, given the opportunity, he would raise more money than he thought he needed.

The founder who spent years emphasising efficiency now recognises the value of room for experiments to fail.

“With the learnings, it could have been a lot shorter, a lot faster, perhaps,” he said.

Wadi began with an old idea that seemed ready for software. Ten years later, Money Fellows has investors, a second market, and a clearer understanding of what it takes to make that idea work between strangers.

The heaviest task was building the trust friends and relatives bring, while making the economics work for the company organising them. Morocco will test how much of that knowledge travels.