Bahrain Women-Led Startups Receive $75K in Equity-Free Funding

The Standard Chartered Foundation reinforces its commitment toward empowering women-led entrepreneurship in Bahrain, by completing its seventh iteration of Women in Tech Bahrain, awarding USD 75,000 equity-free funding to three women-led startups.

Vivid Algorithms by Marwa Hesham, won the first prize amounting to USD 35,000, whereas Maraj, by Latifa Al Khayat, secured the second prize amounting to USD 25,000. The third prize of USD 15,000 went to the startup Jaras, by Walaa Aloraibi.

The programme was hosted in the capital city of Bahrain for three months and focused on the development of 13 women entrepreneurs by enhancing their business models and technological solutions. In terms of broader importance, the program will be of great value for the professional in Fintech as well as other sectors of the digital economy.

Key Highlights:

• Bahrain backs women-led startups with equity-free grant funding
• Women founders gain support to prepare for future VC investment
• Program strengthens Bahrain’s pipeline of scalable women-led ventures

This program concluded with the selection of three startups receiving non-equity grant funding and another three months of incubation support. The assessment of the startups was conducted by a team of business, fintech, investment and development experts, such as Standard Chartered Bahrain, Bahrain FinTech Bay, Tamkeen, and UNIDO ITPO Bahrain.

Seventh edition of the accelerator program ended with a Demo Day in Manama through the collaboration of the Standard Chartered Foundation, Bahrain FinTech Bay, and Village Capital, with an aim to help women develop innovations using technology. On a broader spectrum, the program signals the strengthening of Bahrain’s technological ecosystem, with women-led startups receiving financial and incubation support, helping them to grow commercially.

Bahrain FinTech Bay is one of the leading hubs located in the Middle East area creating a dedicated ecosystem for financial technology innovation through its physical workspace, accelerator programmes, and advisory services. Since the establishment of this global initiative in Bahrain, it has helped more than 60 female-led or female co-founded startups and distributed more than USD 380,000 in grant funding.

This hub plays an important role digitalization in Bahrain as it brings together financial institutions, governmental bodies, technology companies, and startups in order to foster cooperation and create new innovations for women in business.

The Standard Chartered Foundation is an international charity organization with mandate involving economic inclusion and dealing with inequality issues. With its implementation of the Women in Tech project it aims to ensure economic empowerment of women within the tech space through funding, mentoring, and support. Standard Chartered Bank Bahrain, headed by the acting CEO Shaikha Tareef, has brought with it the market understanding and experience for implementation of these projects within the Gulf region.

The cohort marks development and evolution of Bahrain’s entrepreneurial and fintech ecosystem, where the focus moving away from merely helping startups grow their ideas to helping them build a commercially viable startup with revenue-generating potential.

With the help of equity-free grant funding, the program allows founders to get capital without any dilution of ownership that comes with equity financing or repayment that comes with debt financing. This enables entrepreneurs to build up their startups and make themselves ready for VC and institutional investment in the future.

The gradual expansion of this program is also helping to build a strong pipeline of women-led and investment-ready companies in an environment where female founders still have funding access issues. The next challenge for the Gulf financial ecosystem would be securing enough follow-on investment and scale-up capital for the upcoming ventures.