Sovra, a FinTech platform offering users a self-custodial global dollar account, has closed a pre-seed funding round of more than $2m.
The round was led by Pharsalus Capital, with participation from a group of prominent regional and global angel investors. These include Naguib S. Sawiris, chairman of Orascom Development Holding AG; Karim Atiyeh, co-founder of Ramp; Hisham Al-Falih, founder of Lean Technologies; and Hany Rashwan, founder of 21Shares, alongside additional angel investors.
The capital raised will go towards engineering and product development as Sovra prepares for its public launch. The platform’s waitlist is currently open at sovra.money, and the company operates with a distributed team spanning the Middle East and Europe.
Sovra’s platform allows users to hold, earn, spend and send digital dollars directly from their mobile phones. Dollar balances are held in USDC, a regulated US dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Circle, an NYSE-listed, SEC-regulated company audited by Deloitte. Each digital dollar is backed one-to-one by a real US dollar in reserve, and this is fully verifiable.
Users can also access third-party decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols for yield, make card payments across the Visa and Mastercard networks, and transfer funds between accounts at no cost.
Sovra is targeting three primary user segments: young professionals across MENA, university students, and the regional diaspora globally.
Sovra founder and CEO Ahmad Wehbi said: “There has always been something between people and their money; a bank, a border, a fee, a policy, a form. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it took everything. The technology to remove the middleman now exists. Sovra is the simplest way in. Your money works for you and answers only to you. If we disappear tomorrow, it’s still there. That’s not a company policy alone, but the architecture we have built for Sovra.”
Pharsalus Capital managing director Anthony Ghosn said, “By giving people sovereign, self-custodial alternatives to fragile fiat and banking systems, Sovra is helping restore financial dignity in Lebanon and beyond. For those of us with ties to the region, these issues are deeply familiar — and Ahmad and the Sovra team stand out for having the courage and clarity to build where others have been constrained by the scale of the problem.”
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