Viaka #2: Startup Falcon: A Palestinian startup helping founders get fast, reliable and accurate valuations.
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Hi everyone, this is Hani. This week, we’re shining the spotlight on Startup Falcon, a start-up based in Ramallah using their proprietary technology to help founders get fast and accurate valuations. Startup Falcon was founded by Eiass Muhanna, who used to be Head of Enterprise at Palestine Cellular Communications.
Startup Falcon Quick Stats
Founded: 2019
HQ: Ramallah, Palestine (incorporated in Delaware)
Founder: Eiass Muhanna
Product: An automated valuation calculator for early-stage startups, through which startups and investors can get reliable valuations by describing the qualitative variables of their company.
Website: https://startupfalcon.com/
KPI’s:
740 completed valuations
144 upgraded users
$3633 MRR
Ask:
Looking to connect with investors in the US in order to validate and test the product, and see how investors can use it with their portfolio companies.
I got the chance to chat with Eiass about Startup Falcon, their story, and their goals for the future. Here are some of the insights from our chat.
What is Startup Falcon and how/why did it come to life?
Startup Falcon is automated valuation calculator enabling early-stage startups and investors to get reliable valuations by describing the qualitative variables of their companies.
We valuate startups based on the most-recognized qualitative methods: Step-up Method, Risk Mitigation Method, Checklist Method, and Score Card Method.
We believe that early founders should have a solid understanding of their valuation number instead of having a general discussion with investors. Our main goal is to provide a validation framework for startups and investors to facilitate the fundraising process.
What is your personal story and relation to the problem (alongside your founders)
After working in the telecom industry for seven years, I realized life is too short to be spent as an employee. That realization made me decide to quit my job and start my own company, Startup Falcon.
Our mission is to help startup founders in the Middle East connect with investors worldwide by accelerating the fundraising process. Indeed, by providing founders with a complete and accurate valuation tool, we substantially facilitate their negotiations with foreign investors. MENA founders already suffer from a lack of visibility on the world stage, and we want to solve one of the pain points associated to that.
I recruited one of my best friends to help with the technical development of the platform. Before launching the full-fledge valuation engine, we spent a large amount of time on product discovery, customer interviews, and testing different MVPs.
What market are you attacking? Are you adding on or trying to replace current offerings?
While we started with MENA startups, we are now targeting early-stage startups in America and Europe, providing the most specialized valuation tool in this field. We are trying to automate and standardize the valuation process, which is often unnecessarily lengthy and complicated.
What are you looking for from the Viaka community?
We are mainly looking to expand our reach to North America, connecting with investors and accelerators to validate our future directions in building B2B features. We are looking to work with these investors as partners and reference clients, helping us identify their pain points in the fundraising and valuation process to be able to solve their problems in efficient and effective ways.
Where do you hope that will take you?
We hope to reach the next phase of our product, achieving a product-market-fit that empowers sustainable and impactful growth. By catering to both founders and investors, we aim to make Startup Falcon the full-stack valuation tool the startup world needs.
Weekly partner spotlight
Below are a list of announcements curated from the Viaka network of VC-backed start-ups in MENA.
Is looking to connect with angels and early stage VCs in North America for “user research” conversations to help guide the product development of their startup valuation tool.
Which designs and produces 3D-printed invisible dental aligners, is raising their Series A from investors in Health Tech.
Is raising $3m to start large-scale production, and currently connecting with early-stage investors in FoodTech.
A Riyadh-based teledermatology platform is raising a pre-seed round of $400,000, about half of which is already committed.
Below are a list of announcements emanating from the Viaka community members.
Which uses AI to build elegant custom apps worldwide at prices affordable for emerging markets had a HUGE month. They landed their first customer in Africa, launched a crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder, and hit $100K worth in contracts in sold in April 2022
They aim to enable venture studios as a mechanism to incubate 100 scale-ups and over 8,000 innovation jobs from Dubai in the coming years. There is a focus on solutions addressing the “ubiquitous finance” ecosystem including Open Finance, Digital Assets, and Web3.
Is hosting its first in-person dealflow mixer in two years (!) on June 2nd at the Boston Silicon Valley Bank Office. They’ll match top-tier frontier tech investors with Boston's best startups in the fields of Web3, AI, ML, AR/VR, and more. Apply to participate here.
If you would like to get involved with any of the opportunities above, please fill out this form and indicate what opportunity you are interested in in the “notes” section.
That’s it for this week!
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