Egypt’s Welnes has secured a $300,000 seed round with participation from Samurai Incubate, UI Investments, and a group of angel investors in January 2022, led by Flat6labs.
Welnes is a community app that connects users with top-tier nutritionists and trainers to help them achieve their weight-loss and lifestyle objectives.
Welnes was founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneurs Amr Saleh (CEO) and Amr Diab (CTO), both of whom have product experience in industries such as Fintech, IoT, and blockchain.
Welnes provides individualized nutrition and training plans for a variety of lifestyles, including Keto, Low Carb, Plant-Based, and more. The programs are delivered in a group setting, which organically encourages other users, dietitians, and trainers to participate.
The app also features a robust gamification model that keeps users motivated and committed to following through on their programmes. To date, Welnes has helped over 15,000 users who have uploaded an impressive 500,000 meal pictures and made over 5,000,000 likes.
“Our customers love the product, they come for the nutrition and workout plans and they stay for the community”, says Amr Saleh, co-founder and CEO of Welnes. “We have a very strong technical team who built a great product and we can’t wait to spread it out across all segments of the market”.
Welnes’ current round of investors all share an appreciation for the app’s mission statement —
Dina el-Shenoufy of Flat6labs comments, “As seed investors, we understand that our biggest qualifiers for assessing successful ventures are mainly the team and market potential. Having invested alongside Amr before, we are quite confident of his ability to execute on capturing the nascent but strongly growing market of healthy living in the Middle East. Amr and his stellar team are developing the perfect platform to aid clients in achieving just that”
Risa Takeda of Samurai Incubate notes, “Staying healthy is one of the most important things in your life yet not many people realize it until they face a problem. Not everyone does exercise, but everyone eats. We think Welnes’s community-focused approach will let more people increase awareness of their bodies by taking care of what they take in everyday. We are excited to join the journey of making Welnes a big community to empower people.”
Tarek Roushdy, CEO of UI Investments, concludes, “I am really pleased to be part of Welnes’ journey. Their mission to have a fit body, which is part of my passion in promoting the healthy lifestyle, then their strong and powerful team, the leadership in place, in addition to the traction they made so far and the huge growth they plan to achieve in the next couple of years, all were some of the various reasons brought me on board This journey … I am looking forward to enjoying it with the Welnes team.”
The funds from this round will be spent on expanding the team and preparing the company for GCC expansion by 2023.
