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Kuwait-based Al Muhalab VC has led a $1.5 million pre-Series A round for Palestine-born and US-headquartered SaaS startup Gamiphy. The...

Does Palestine have investment-ready startups? Majd Zghyer is the strategy officer at uMake, an entrepreneurship support organisation (ESO) based in Ramallah, Palestine. So far this year, startups across the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) have raised over a $1 billion in investment, a record-breaking amount for the regional ecosystem. Most of the investment in the region however, is concentrated in the three biggest hubs – the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Out of the 249 startups that raised investment in the first half of this year, just one of them was Palestinian (Kenz). The funding ...

WASHINGTON/PNN/ With nearly half of Palestinian firms expected to shrink by almost 50% in production and sales and lay off 24% of their employees because of the COVID-19 impact, the World Bank yesterday granted an additional $9 million to the ongoing Innovative Private Sector Development Project to foster the resilience of innovative start-ups and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) through financial and technical assistance, according to a World Bank press release. “The COVID-19 crisis has severely affected the private sector in an already weak Palestinian economy. SMEs and start-ups are n...

“The Covid-19 crisis has severely affected the private sector in an already weak Palestinian economy. SMEs and start-ups are now experiencing serious capacity constraints and need financial support to curb layoffs and avoid bankruptcy,” Kanthan Shankar, World Bank country director for West Bank and Gaza, said. The World Bank’s response to “ensure business continuity and job preservation is critically important, especially for youth and women affected by the pandemic”. This move follows the World Bank's recent grant of $20m to improve access to high-speed broadband services in Palest...