bluworks, an Egypt-based startup developing blue-collar HRTech SaaS solutions, has announced raising a USD 1 million pre-seed investment round led by Saudi venture capital firm Khawarizmi Ventures.
The funding round was joined by Camel Ventures, Acasia Ventures, in addition to a group of angel investors.
Founded in 2022 by Farah Osman, Hussein Wahdan, and Nour Ahmadein, bluworks is the only HRTech SaaS platform in the MENA region focused on managing the entire lifecycle of blue-collar employees in industries such as retail, F&B, facility management, healthcare, education, and construction.
With over 50 million blue-collar workers across the Middle East and Africa, bluworks aims to automate various HR and operational tasks in order to help companies optimize cost while leveraging data for actionable decision-making.
Through an integrated platform to bridge gaps between Ops, HR and workers, bluworks unifies and collects data points for companies employing blue-collar workers.
bluworks plans to use the funding round to build and enhance its product, as well as expand its team.
“With so many HR software in the market, not one is built to manage blue-collar workers,” Wahdan explains. “Since the process of managing this type of workforce is so manual, errors frequently occur, leading to penalties and deducted salaries with no oversight from the workers, causing them to leave and ultimately contributing to high turnover rates.”
Today, bluworks has thousands of blue-collar workers on its platform and tens of clients, such as Egyptian chains Crave, Qahwa, and Cilantro, using the platform to manage them. The company is currently focusing on the F&B and retail sectors, with plans to expand to other sectors, such as manufacturing, construction, and facility management.
“Egypt has one of the largest workforce populations in the MENA and Africa region; however, there are very few software solutions that are truly localized,” Venture Partner at Khwarizmii Ventures Ameer Sherif notes.
“Like with many emerging markets, solutions to automate workforce management are still lacking. We believe that the bluworks team has the right mix between local understanding and the commercial and technical capability to lead this space in Egypt and later in other regional markets.”
