bluworks Raises $1M to Revolutionize Blue-Collar Workforce Management in MENA

bluworks, an Egypt-based startup developing blue-collar HRTech SaaS solutions, has raised a $1 million pre-Seed investment round, led by Saudi venture capital firm Khwarizmi Ventures. The funding round was joined by Camel Ventures, Acasia Ventures, and a pool of angel investors.

Founded in 2022 by Farah Osman, Hussein Wahdan, and Nour Ahmadein, bluworks is the only HRTech SaaS platform in the region focused on managing the lifecycle of blue-collar employees in industries such as retail, F&B, facility management, healthcare, education, and construction. Ultimately, this includes automating various HR and operational tasks in order to help companies optimise costs while leveraging data for decision-making. To do that, bluworks unifies and collects data points for companies employing blue-collar workers through an integrated platform that bridges the gap between operations, HR, and the workers. 

The Middle East and Africa are home to over 50 million blue-collar workers. Currently, performance and attendance metrics about hired blue-collar workers are collected manually by several departments across companies through different manual and automated systems. Given that blue-collar work conditions are very dynamic and can vary from day to day, a very routine task, such as payroll calculation for these workers, becomes incredibly difficult and complex for companies. 

“With so many HR softwares on 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. Currently, companies can spend about 7-10 days just closing their payroll accounts, but with bluworks, this time can be cut down to one day - all while leveraging data and insights on their workforce.”

Today, bluworks has thousands of blue-collar workers on its platform, and tens of clients, such as 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. 

“Having a strong workforce is integral to building and fortifying sustainable businesses,” Osman says. “We are excited about getting strategic investors on-board that can provide us with access to both local and regional markets, to which we are looking to expand. There is no shortage of industry use cases similar to Egypt around the world, and we are eager to tackle them with our innovative workforce management solutions.”

“Egypt has one of the largest workforce populations in the MENA and Africa region; however, there are very few software solutions that are truly localised," 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 of local understanding, and commercial and technical capability to lead this space in Egypt and later in other regional markets.” 

“bluworks has identified a real pain point for employers and developed a compelling digital solution that focuses on a particular niche,” adds Aly El Shalakany, Managing Partner at Acasia Ventures. “Initial traction is very promising, and we are confident that bluworks will be able to scale this solution rapidly.”

bluworks aims to use the funding round to build and enhance its product, as well as expand its team, with the ultimate aim of becoming the top destination for companies seeking to optimise the management of blue-collar workers in the region and in need of a process to vet, hire, train, place and manage their workforce.

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