The Sixth Edition of "Foras Feen" Kicks Off on December 31, 2025

The sixth edition of Foras Feen will take place on December 31, 2025, at the Greek Campus, marking the launch of its 2026 edition. The event has evolved beyond being a year-end annual gathering to become a key market indicator that reads ongoing market shifts and translates them into early, practical discussions, helping entrepreneurs and investors understand where real opportunities are actually heading.
Since Startup Grind Cairo adopted the idea and transformed it into a fixed annual milestone, the core philosophy of Foras Feen has remained unchanged: leading the conversation by anticipating market movements before they dominate the local and regional startup ecosystems.

A Changing Market
The sixth edition comes at an exceptional moment for Egypt’s and the region’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. Data indicates rapid changes in funding structures, investor preferences, and startup priorities.
Regionally, Wamda’s data shows that startups in the MENA region raised approximately $3.5 billion during the first nine months of 2025, including $900 million in equity funding and $2.6 billion in debt financing. This figure reflects a year that was more selective than celebratory, as capital is no longer awarded for growth alone, but for the strength and sustainability of business models.

Regional Markets
The same data highlights the growing weight of specific regional markets, with Saudi Arabia capturing the largest share of funding in the region.
Egypt Leads Startup Activity in Africa
In Egypt, the picture combines resilience and recalibration, while the country continues to lead startup activity across Africa. This confirms that even during periods of volatility, the market does not lose momentum, it simply reorders its priorities.

The Philosophy of Foras Feen
This is where the philosophy of Foras Feen becomes clear: an event designed to read changes as they are forming. During the fifth edition in 2024, “opportunities” were not discussed as a vague concept, but rather as actionable sectors, including digital transformation, renewable energy, and agritech.
The event achieved over two million views across social media platforms, extending its impact far beyond the event hall into the broader entrepreneurial discourse.

Future Trends
Previous editions have collectively built forward-looking content focused on regional market trends, while offering practical approaches to building more resilient business models amid exchange rate volatility and changing capital costs. A consistent emphasis has been placed on regional expansion rooted in achieving local market success first.

Financial Sustainability
Foras Feen was among the first platforms to raise issues that later moved to the top of the agenda, particularly in fintech and adjacent sectors. In a discussion moderated by Hussein El Menawy, early conversations explored topics that closely align with today’s debates on financial sustainability, consumer debt, and risk management.
Speakers discussed the impact of rising inflation and interest rates on installment-based retail markets, emphasizing the need for regulation and oversight an issue that now sits at the heart of the regional discussion around Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) models.

Real Opportunities
The same edition also explored opportunities in B2B marketplaces, highlighting their capacity to absorb more players in Egypt. It examined the growth of the used-products market as a smart response to import challenges and rising prices. Meanwhile, online education was addressed through a critical lens that distinguished between ambition, readiness, and infrastructure.
In the same spirit, fintech was positioned as a long-term winning card, with growth dependent on strong ideas and solid execution, an early insight that explains why fintech continues to regain investor attention with every market recovery cycle.

A Logical Accumulation
Against this backdrop, the sixth edition in 2026 represents a logical accumulation, not a sudden leap. It revisits the same core questions: Where does technology translate into real value? And where does hype turn into a bubble?
At the center of these discussions, artificial intelligence emerges not as a buzzword, but as a new operational layer redefining productivity, customer experience, and product development speed.
In parallel, BNPL and embedded finance appear as extensions of earlier discussions around installment models, risk management, and consumer awareness, this time within a more mature ecosystem driven by data, governance, and financial integration.

Understanding Market Shifts
Hussein El Menawy, Business Development Consultant and Managing Director of Startup Grind Cairo, stated that the sixth edition of Foras Feen aims to realign the discussion toward its true purpose. He emphasized that Foras Feen was never designed as a traditional event, but rather as a platform to understand market transformations and anticipate real opportunities.
He also revealed plans to transform Foras Feen into a leading content production platform, inspired by global models such as TechCrunch, to support Egypt’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Tangible Impact
Mohamed Nagaty highlighted that the real impact of Foras Feen lies in its ability to link the broader economic context with day-to-day founding and operational decisions within companies. He noted that markets have shifted over recent years from rapid growth toward discipline and efficiency, necessitating continuous reassessment of what truly works on the ground.
He emphasized that the event helps entrepreneurs and decision-makers distinguish between passing trends and buildable, sustainable opportunities, stressing that success depends less on following hype and more on execution, impact measurement, and proving real value.

A Data-Driven Message
The sixth edition launches with a clear message: entrepreneurship ecosystems in Egypt and the region are no longer driven by intuition alone, but by data, experience, and learning from market cycles. Foras Feen will remain an annual space that matures the questions before the answers, reinforcing a core belief: opportunities are not only discovered, they are created when deep market understanding meets disciplined execution.

Source: Press Release