Announcing the Investment of 4 Major Funds in Zoomaal

by Naharnet Newsdesk 04 July 2013, 12:25

It's here, the full A-Z crowdfunding solution for Arab based projects!

It has been a long journey for the Beirut based Zoomaal to launch after having faced regional concerns of money-laundering and funding terrorism.

Today, Zoomaal is announcing the investment of four major VC funds in MENA: Wamda, N2V, Sawari Ventures, and Middle East Venture Partners. This is the first startup in the whole region to ever get all these VCs on one board, and they're here to support creative projects in 22 emerging Arab countries that have nearly $0 government spending in R&D.

Zoomaal is founded by Abdallah Absi, a serial young entrepreneur based in Lebanon and a great supporter of Arab entrepreneurship. He is also the founder of the Entrepreneurship Club in Lebanon that raises awareness about entrepreneurship among students. He is helping and mentoring various entrepreneurial initiatives in the region, and just recently in Baghdad.

Crowdfunding is a platform where creative project owners can post their projects online and start raising funds from everyone around the world through credit card and other methods.

Contributors who fund projects are given rewards in return. For example, if someone needs $10,000 to fund a film documentary within 30 days, they will offer you several rewards: if you contribute $5 to the project, they will tell you thank you and expose you on her project's social media channels. However, if you contribute $30, they will send you a special edition golden plated DVD of the documentary, and if you pay $500, they may have you more involved in the creation of the documentary, and so on.

Zoomaal is going live on July 4 with projects from 11 Arab countries:

http://www.zoomaal.com

Here is what some influential Arabs have said about Zoomaal:

"There is an abundance of creative talent in the Arab world and Zoomaal is a platform for collective action…where creativity encounters support." - Fadi Ghandour, Chairman and Founder of Aramex.

"Zoomaal will open up many possibilities for creativity to flourish in the region" - Hala Fadel, Chairman of MIT Arab Ent Forum.

Trying not to be just another crowdfunding platform, here are some edges where Zoomaal tried to differentiate themselves:

1. Unique funding source: Getting projects funded in the Arab world is very difficult knowing that people don't have credit cards. Zoomaal's strategic model is sourcing projects from the Arab world and getting these projects funded from the Arab diaspora in the U.S., Europe, and Canada who have credit cards, disposable incomes, and want to give back to their communities.

2. A-Z payments platform: there isn't any crowdfunding platform right now that supports a fully A-Z payment solution for paying and getting paid in the Arab world - due to strict regulations in some countries, and lack of credit cards. Zoomaal also supports more than 12 payment methods to pay through offline scratch cards, paypal and credit cards. For paying out to project owners, Zoomaal has local partners in almost every Arab country to facilitate the movement and receipt of funds. The platform uses the all-or-nothing model, so if a project owner doesn't raise his/her funding goal by the deadline, all the money goes back to the backers to their balances on Zoomaal (or not charged at all if credit card was used for the contribution).

3. Education and Fun UX: If you go to any new page, you see some tours to educate people about crowdfunding. This is highly needed for the Arab world. Zoomaal has these kind of tours around the site in several areas. They made sure that the project page was redesigned from the

traditional design of crowdfunding pages to make it more intuitive to use the site.

4. Sharing Sharing Sharing: Crowdfunding is all about sharing, so Zoomaal tried to focus their efforts and made sure they had the best sharing tools in the market - vs Indiegogo and Kickstarter:

A. Facebook advanced sharing: They created a hangman-like game where you have to select your friends to reveal a word, and then after you submit they generate a photo (since it's the most engaging on FB) of the project to be shared and post it on facebook and tag your friends. You can try it here. Or check the screenshots here.

B. Mass Emails: just go to any project page you'll see on the left sidebar that you can type an email and quickly send an email recommendation (5 sec), compared to indiegogo's "mailto:" email function from 1990s.

5. Top-notch partnerships: with project service providers, like video producers, reward manufacturers, courier services, etc. Zoomaal is also working closely on strategic partnerships with Arab expat organizations like TechWadi in Silicon Valley and creative communities that always have an influx of projects.

Zoomaal is trying to maintain an average of $5,000 for all their projects they have in the initial phase. It is mandatory for every project must have a video. Zoomaal takes a fee of 5 percent from only successful projects. Accepted categories: any project that is creative and is development oriented - no charity, or fund myself. Religious, political, alcohol, and pornography projects are immediately banned.

If you have a project, you can submit it from here: http://www.zoomaal.com/create