Startup Zest Equity raises $3.8 million in seed funding

This new round brings the total funding raised by the startup to $5.7 million

UAE-based Zest Equity, a startup digitizing private market dealings, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding to build more tools to enable fast and transparent transactions by ecosystem players while increasing their liquidity via secondary deals.

The seed round was led by Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP), with participation from the DFDF and DASH Ventures. This new round brings the total funding raised by the startup to $5.7 million.

Zest Equity was founded by Rawan Baddour and Zuhair Shamma in 2021 initially as a marketplace for the secondary trading but evolved quickly into a platform that enables ecosystem players such as founders and VCs to transact quick and openly online. Conventionally, these players transact offline, which can be tedious, obscure and costly.

Baddour says they took this path because of the lack of infrastructure to empower communication, connection and information sharing amongst different stakeholders in a cost-effective and digitized way.

We are digitizing a lot of what is actually very manual, and we have taken a tech-first approach to automate as much as we can, while building a platform that is unique and scalable, Baddour, a former banking executive, told TechCrunch.

Founders use Zest Equity’s tools to, among other actions, invite investors to fundraising rounds, share information including pitch decks and cap tables, and track deal processes. Investors get to submit their interest, see other venture capitalists participating in the round and sign documents.

We have built a digital platform that allows (founders and investors) to share or get data that they want to share, and invite their network of people to participate in deals. On the other side, we provide them with the legal infrastructure to group all of these people that they have brought in into a single entity to keep the cap table clean and to streamline the whole process, said Baddour, adding that the funding will go into building new tools to make the process even more seamless.