Tech in Africa
Most businesses are having to adopt some form of an online presence to remain competitive during the Covid-19 pandemic. Developing a website is quite easy these days due to the presence of website builders and many online tools that allow you to complete the task in minutes. Egypt website builder Wuilt is planning to capitalize on the adoption of digital and internet technologies by focussing on the vast number of Arabic speakers and Arabic businesses online.
Wuilt is founded by Ahmed Rostom, Mahmoud Metwaly, and Mohamed Hegazy to help those with little building knowledge create and manage their Arabic websites. The startup operates an online website builder launched in 2019 and runs as a SaaS platform. According to their website, you can build a site in 5 minutes. The company announced a $535,000 raise in seed funding from UK’s MENA Technology Fund, Saudi Arabia Daal VC, angel investors, and Flat6Labs Cairo who provided follow-on funding.
According to Menabytes, Wuilt will begin at $5 a month then slowly rise to $15. All platform users get a 14-day trial use period. The platform serves 30,000 free and paying users across Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The funding will power its plans of launching an e-commerce enablement platform that helps users create online stores, and expand its Saudi Arabian presence – which accounts for 30% of its customers.
It’s not easy coming up with an Arabic website builder. First, converging the technologies in both the developer and spoken languages is very complex. At conception, the programming world needed the right language standards when developing code, meaning the default settings are in English. Secondly, the internet is sort of tailored in a manner that favors those speaking English. Most markets during the early adoption of the internet were English speaking, hence the content and web tools created. Arabic is now the world’s fourth most spoken language, hence the need for website development to tailor content to the local Arabic language.
