Mostafa El-Beltagy

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Mostafa El-Beltagy

Nawy, CEO

After Nawy, one of Africa’s biggest proptech startups, became profitable in 2024, CEO Mostafa El-Beltagy drove operational scale-up in 2025. Under his leadership, Nawy transitioned from a simple proptech “connector” to a real estate tech and asset management platform, raising $75 million Series A in May.

Since 2020, Nawy has grown its gross merchandise value (GMV) by over 174% compounded annually, reaching $1.4 billion by the end of 2024. The proptech firm records about EGP 100 billion ($2 billion) in sales, and has 50x’d its revenue in the last four years. The company says it now serves over 1 million users, works with 150 real estate developers, and supports over 6,500 brokerages, up from 3,000 at the start of the year.

Crucially, Nawy is no longer a property listings site. In 2025, El-Beltagy completed its transition into a vertically integrated real estate ecosystem. Alongside its marketplace, Nawy launched “Nawy Now,” a licensed mortgage product that lets buyers move into homes and pay over time, a critical service in Egypt’s low mortgage penetration economy. It also pushed Nawy Shares, Egypt’s first regulated fractional property ownership platform, and incorporated a real estate fund company under the oversight of the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA).

In January 2025, Nawy acquired ROA, a property management and finishing company, and launched “Nawy Unlocked,” addressing Egypt’s estimated 10 million unfinished or underused properties by financing renovations and managing rentals. On the supply side, “Nawy Partners” grew into one of the country’s largest B2B proptech platforms for real estate brokers, providing software tools and faster commission payouts to help them close deals more efficiently.

Backed by Partech and other global investors, El-Beltagy is now taking Nawy into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Morocco, cementing the startup’s place as the most significant proptech operator in Africa.

How We Selected

Building anything of value is hard anywhere in the world. In Africa, it is harder. The Builders’ List recognises people doing it anyway.

Beyond shipping products, Africa’s technology ecosystem constantly navigates unreliable power, fragmented logistics, weak public infrastructure, and regulatory uncertainty—often all at once. Progress is rarely linear, and success is usually hard-won.

Founders alone do not make the industry. It is sustained by people doing a variety of work, some of it invisible but critical to the industry’s success. To recognise them, TechCabal is launching The Builders’ List: an annual index of the most consequential people shaping Africa’s technology ecosystem in the calendar year. It is a record of who’s building, and what their work reveals about the system they are building within.

For the inaugural edition, our selected Builders are grouped across five categories:

Operators: Those who make systems work at scale.
Innovators: Those creating new products, models, or technical possibilities.
Enablers: The individuals and institutions lowering the cost of building for others.
Organisers: Those connecting people, capital, and opportunity.
Keepers: The stewards of trust, continuity, and institutional memory.

Together, these roles offer a more complete map of how the ecosystem functions.

The Builders’ List is an editorial project led by the TechCabal newsroom, informed by independent reporting and conversations with founders, operators, investors, policymakers, and long-time ecosystem observers across the continent and the diaspora.

Our selections were based on our assessment of what materially changed within the calendar year, from infrastructure to policy or scale, rather than reputation or momentum alone. Where work is still emerging, progress was evaluated within the realities of the sector, market, and country in which it occurred.

Candidates were assessed comparatively and contextually. Starting from over 600 deeply researched names spanning all 54 African countries, we weighed outcomes against each builder’s operating environment—geography, regulation, capital access, impact and institutional maturity. Context that applies in Lagos doesn’t automatically translate to Kigali or Dakar.

Final decisions were made through editorial review. While external perspectives informed our reporting, the list reflects TechCabal’s independent editorial judgment.

This process, as our first, has been a critical learning curve. It reminded us that Africa’s technology ecosystem is far broader than funding headlines suggest—spanning hardware engineers in Cairo, beekeepers in rural Kenya, ministers rewiring infrastructure, and documentarians building institutional memory.

We learned that in 2025, the builders who matter most are no longer defined by capital raised or growth velocity, but by what they’ve made durable. This list revealed an ecosystem maturing past obsessions with scale and spectacle, toward the quieter work of building things that last—profitable businesses, regulatory frameworks, talent pipelines, and infrastructure others can build on.

The Builders’ List will return in 2026, and the patterns will shift. But the commitment remains: to document not just who is building, but what their work reveals about the system taking shape.

Africa’s technology ecosystem is firmly in its endurance era

Temitayo Jaiyeola, Senior Reporter and Lead Curator, The Builders’ List