The US-based educational technology start-up Manara, which helps engineers from the Middle East and North Africa region get jobs at top tech companies such as Google, Meta and Amazon, raised $3 million in a pre-seed funding round.
The latest round was led by FinTech company Stripe with participation from Mudassir Sheikha, founder and chief executive of ride-hailing firm Careem; LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman; Paul Graham, founder of start-up accelerator Y-Combinator; and Eric Ries, a California-based entrepreneur and the author of Lean Start-up.
“We received more appetite from investors than we could accommodate, signalling an increasing interest from Silicon Valley in platforms that facilitate online and offline communities, and solutions to access highly skilled talent from emerging markets,” said Iliana Montauk, co-founder and chief executive of Manara.
Founded last year, Manara aims to use the new funds to scale its existing cohort-based solution to go from 60 engineers per year to 6,000. It also plans to launch a self-service product for interview practice, networking and mentorship that can reach millions of software engineers, the company said.
“Communities can be extremely powerful if you are smart about how to curate and connect them … the trick is knowing when one hour of a Google engineer’s time has the highest leverage,” Ms Montauk said.
Manara is a remote company that employs people all over the world, including Dubai. Founders Ms Montauk and Laila Abudahi live in California but work remotely.
The start-up’s solution enables cohort-based learning for software engineers and computer scientists through a digital platform. On average, users’ salaries have increased 300 per cent, Manara said.
About Author
