Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris joins the $2 million pre-seed round of UAE fintech Sovra as an early backer

Naguib Sawiris has made another fintech bet. This time it is a startup born from the wreckage of Lebanon's banking collapse.

The Egyptian billionaire and chairman of Orascom Development Holding AG joined the pre-seed round of Sovra, a UAE-based fintech platform that raised more than $2 million on June 16, 2026. Pharsalus Capital led the round, with participation from a group of regional and global angel investors including Karim Atiyeh, founder of Ramp, Hisham Al-Falih, founder of Lean Technologies, and Hany Rashwan, founder of 21shares.

The capital will be used to expand Sovra's engineering and product teams in preparation for its public launch.

Sovra was founded in 2025 by Ahmad Wehbi, who watched Lebanon's banking system collapse in 2019 when deposits were frozen and the national currency lost more than 98 percent of its value. That experience shaped what he built. Sovra is a self-custodial financial platform that gives users a global dollar account, allowing them to hold digital dollars, earn yield, send money internationally and spend via a card that works anywhere in the world, all without a bank in the middle.

The core architecture separates Sovra from traditional neobanks and payments apps. In a self-custodial model, the platform itself cannot access or freeze user funds. The account belongs entirely to the user, not the company. Sovra describes itself as infrastructure, not a gatekeeper.

Wehbi's founding thesis is direct. "There has always been something between people and their money: a bank, a border, a fee, a policy, a form," he said at launch. "Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it took everything."

The platform targets three initial segments: young professionals across MENA, university students and the regional diaspora globally. All three groups share a common need: reliable, borderless access to dollar-denominated financial services that do not depend on the stability of a local banking system or currency.

For Sawiris, the Sovra investment adds a fintech dimension to a portfolio that has been increasingly focused on hard assets in recent years. His gold holdings through La Mancha Resources have more than doubled in value since the start of geopolitical tensions, and his UAE property play through Ora Developers expanded its Bayn project to $8.17 billion earlier in 2026. He also backed Morocco's BluEV electric mobility platform with $100 million in 2025.

The Sovra pre-seed is small by those standards. But the company he is joining alongside, Karim Atiyeh of Ramp and Hany Rashwan of 21shares, are serious operators in the global fintech and digital assets space. The quality of the co-investors signals that Sovra is not a casual bet. It is an early-stage conviction play in a category, self-custodial financial infrastructure for emerging market users, that Sawiris and his co-investors believe has significant room to grow.