Malaeb, a mobile app for football fans founded by Ahmed AlRawi and Yasser Rasheed, had just raised funds from the Raed Ventures, a Saudi corporate venture capital firm that’s established by Almajdouie Holding LLC.
Raed Ventures just posted a tweet stating that they led the seed round of Malaeb with the participation of Vision Ventures, Inspire Ventures, and 500 Startups.
Malaeb allows football lovers to find and book football fields around Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The app was launched in 2016 with the aim of helping people find a football pitch to play as it can get challenging and time consuming to find one and it also allows you to organize and join football matches. “You can find and book your football field from the app, as it is very difficult to find the suitable field and go through the booking process. We offer hundreds of sports fields to solve that issue,” Ahmed told Startup MGZN.
With the investment, Ahmed says that they’re planning to utilize it to meet two of their KPIs, which includes increasing the number of venues on the app and increase the number of users. Malaeb is also aiming to grow the team and expand into new areas, mainly penetrating Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries, in addition to adding different kind of sports and sports venues.
“I’m very happy to see the progress we reached to so far which led to this investment. Malaeb has grown rapidly in less than a year and a half. We are operating in 4 countries and we helped over 100 thousand players play their favorite sport,” Ahmed said. Moreover, Malaeb managed to collect around $1 million in the span of 15 months through their bookings only, and they’ve also had more than 150,000 football fans use their app to book football fields.
The Malaeb app is available for download on Apple Store and Google Play. You can also follow them on Instagram and Twitter for their updates.