By Noura Shibl
There are multi million dollar companies internationally recognised that were started by ambitious college students such as Facebook and FedEx. Engezni is an example of an Egyptian startup that was started by college students and it is revolutionizing the food scene in Egypt.
It all started in the summer of 2013, when Amr Ashraf and Ahmed Shinawy, two computer-engineering students from the American University in Cairo were taking a mobile development class. Their idea for their class project was an application named Engezni. The application aims to easily link customers with restaurants to make orders all over Egypt and to help food lovers to post reviews of restaurants. Engezni’s pages on social media websites regularly posts photos of meals and reviews of rising restaurants.
The mobile application was officially launched in January 2014, during the food event, Koshary festival. The application won the 2nd place at the 2014 University Mobile Challenge at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. The Mobile World Congress is the biggest conference for mobile technology in the world with over 70,000 participants hitting Barcelona each year to attend the conference.
Today Engezni’s Facebook page has more than 400,000 likes and more than 55,000 followers on instagram.
Amr Ashraf said that AUC helped them a lot to establish their startup, as its media office helped promoting the application; the office also helped publicizing the team’s winning at the Mobile Challenge Competition. The Computer Engineering Department nominated the application for the first place at the competition.
According to Ashraf, the troubled economic and political atmosphere made it very challenging to find investors. Most investors were not motivated to participate in a startup under the current economic circumstances. Eventually a Jordanian investor was found.
Engezni’s founders had a creative launch event, which was the Koshary festival held back in January 2015. Upon the festival, Egypt broke the Guinness world record for the largest plate of Koshary, which was made by the Koshary restaurant Abu Tarek. The launch event aimed to encourage the tourism industry in Egypt and helped to encourage various Egyptian restaurants to participate in one of the biggest food events. The Koshary festival made headlines for various newspapers and it was a huge success for a startup.
Engezni also contributed in the first food festival that was held in AUC last March. The festival had many gourmet restaurants and featured the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila. The food festival was a success and more than 4000 people attended it. Ashraf said that it is possible to have an annual food festival at AUC.
According to Amr Ashraf, Engezni is like Instagram for food. “It is a social network where people can share their experience, view what your friends are ordering and recommending, check reviews from others, while at the same time ordering online,” he said.
Ahmed Shinawy said that what makes Engezni different from other food ordering applications is that it is meant to be fast, accurate and convenient. An order placed through Engezni system appears directly at the restaurant instead of having to call the restaurant. Engezni also allows users to discover new restaurants and food items.
#Stay tuned to more stories about successful Egyptian Startups
