"We Got Funded!" Egypt-Based Synapse Analytics' US$2 Million Funding Round Is Set To Expand Its Artificial Intelligence Technologies Across The GCC And Africa "We are building to give fintechs all the tools to provide the right product to the right customer, safely and responsibly."
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Synapse Analytics, an Egypt-based startup that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to help financial institutions make better business decisions, has raised US$2 million in a funding round led by Silicon Badia, a Jordan-based venture capital and private equity firm. The round also saw the participation of Hub71, an Abu Dhabi-based global tech ecosystem that supports startups, which is also where Synapse Analytics has set up its regional headquarters, in addition to its main base in Cairo.
Founded in 2018 by Ahmed Abaza and Galal El Beshbishy, Synapse Analytics was created with a mission to increase financial inclusion and access in the region. The startup does this by providing AI-powered software that can be used across a number of financial decisions, including credit scoring, cross-selling, dynamic pricing, and electronic know your customer/business (eKYC/eKYB) processes. Synapse Analytics' first point of ease creation, however, is in how the software itself can be installed within existing financial institutions.
"When it comes to AI, cloud is usually a main prerequisite, but this limits the capabilities of many banks to deploy AI capabilities—our tools, however, can be deployed on-premise, cloud or hybrid" notes Abaza, who is the company's CEO. "AI isn't just a tool—it's the catalyst for making financial inclusion a reality in the MEA region. Our technology is designed to help financial institutions make their services inclusive, accessible, affordable, convenient, empowering, and safe."
But to understand how Synapse Analytics facilitates greater financial inclusivity and access, it is important to first be introduced to the comprehensive suite of solutions it offers. The first of these is Konan, a platform that enables financial institutions to fully automate their credit risk policy workflows through the provision of pretrained AI credit scoring models.
"With AI, financial institutions can treat every applicant as part of almost one segment!" Abaza says. "Depending on what context and data is provided, the applicants thus get a much fairer score than any other traditional means. This creates incredible opportunities for fintechs to expand their market segments and expedites financial inclusion drastically. Konan also allows for financial officers to build their own AI decision policies, for credit scoring or product matching or pricing—for example, autonomously and without any intervention from technical teams. This allows for speed of launching credit products, and diffusion of responsibility. With our simulations features they are sure that the policies they're launching are safe and aligns with compliance fully. This enables financial institutions to access the much dreamt about instantaneous decisioning without worry."
Another AI-powered tool offered by Synapse Analytics is Doxter, a platform that can extract any data in Arabic and English regardless of the format of the document. "With Doxter's specialized features such as context understanding, table detection and so on, it gives incredible flexibility when it comes to onboarding different clients," Abaza continues. "Our customers use Doxter for eKYC, fraud detection, financial statement spreading, commercial register extraction and many more. Moreover, with SME financing being a tough problem to crack, we see that document management is one of its main obstacles. For that, Doxter connects to any data room, and is able to create investment summaries and extract insights such as shareholding structure and dates of incorporation."
There is also Azkavision, Synapse Analytics' AI video analytics plug and play platform that enables a given entity's surveillance system to capture information that can enable better data driven decisions. According to the startup's co-founder and COO El Beshbishy, this current range of offerings could potentially induce a collaborative shift within the MENA's financial sector.
"Through our product suite, we have seen new forms of partnerships blooming, such as non-financial institutions integrating with financial institutions to offer seamless financial products for their customers," El Beshbishy says. "We have also seen finance entities starting their digital credit journeys using our AI models marketplace, which is built through agreements with our customers who have unique data exposures (UDE), on top of which these models are built, to launch their AI digital policies from day one. These pretrained models include models that are able to score largely unbanked populations. We have also witnessed our customers using Doxter to spread SME data into their engines to offer an assessment for SMEs in record timing. Our alternative data models are able to give credit ratings for people who don't have any banking history whatsoever. Additionally, our probability of default (PD) models, help our customers to predict delinquencies and offer their borrowers ways to pay that are more convenient, helping a lot of people who don't really know the gravity of not paying on time, and falling out of credit bureaus grace."
In the midst this explanation, however, the co-founding duo do not forget to mention the trends within AI that largely contributed towards the curation of Synapse Analytics' services. "Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models came at the perfect timing," Abaza reveals. "Our entire product suite now has full integration with different LLMs that are making our products more generalized. For instance, financial statement extraction used to be a pain. We were very good at extracting and spreading financial data but on limited templates of bank and financial statements. Integrating these models with our optical character recognition (OCR) features, have opened the world for us. Now you can extract data from any type of financial statement, even in German if you'd prefer, very accurately, using our Doxter product. Not to mention, it vastly enhanced our simulation and calibration capabilities for our clients to quickly test and launch their AIs to market."
As it happens, it has been this foresightedness that has appealed to the lead investor behind Synapse Analytics' latest funding round as well. "We see many AI companies, but Synapse stood out for its proprietary technology that addresses critical pain points for financial institutions," said Hamed Masri, Partner at Silicon Badia, in a statement. "The impact clients see on non-performing loan rates and processing times speaks volumes about the strength of their product. We're excited about the versatility of their tech in other verticals and believe there's no better team to execute on the founders' vision."
Indeed, with this fresh influx of capital, Synapse Analytics will now aim to expand its AI technologies further across the GCC and Africa. "The funds will mainly go towards our geographical expansion, and the continuation of our product development; we are eyeing the Gulf and African markets," says El Beshbishy. "Further building our reach through channels and extending our commercial teams is also on the cards. We're creating a suite of new very exciting features that further develops the network effects of our products, where we enable different fintech players to collaborate with invading any privacies, and to also collaborate with non-financial institutions as well. We're coining a new term for it, but will announce it later this year!"
As Abaza and El Beshbishy look to the future, the co-founders say they will continue their business endeavors equipped with the singular sentiment that kickstarted this whole venture: that all people deserve an equal chance to receive financial services. "Andrew Ng [a computer scientist and technology entrepreneur who co-founded Google Brain] once said that AI is the new electricity, and we see ourselves to be the electricity of the prosperous fintech ecosystem in MEA," Abaza declares. "We see our products as a place for fintech collective wisdom, and connecting different fintechs together to offer incredible financial services personalized to our local context and thus creating a pioneering fintech ecosystem for our region. In essence, we believe that most people are good, we believe that eligibility criteria should be more than 80%. We believe given the right process and product, most people will pay their dues. We are building to give fintechs all the tools to provide the right product to the right customer, safely and responsibly. We are bullish to prove that people are good, they're just not given the right products in many cases."
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