Sixth Edition of “Where Are the Opportunities?” to Launch on December 31, 2025
The sixth edition of “Where Are the Opportunities?” will kick off on December 31, 2025, at the Greek Campus, marking its evolution from a year-end gathering into a key market indicator that reads emerging shifts in the entrepreneurship ecosystem and translates them into early, actionable discussions for founders and investors alike.
Since being adopted and institutionalized by Startup Grind Cairo as an annual flagship event, the core philosophy of “Where Are the Opportunities?” has remained unchanged: anticipating market movements before they dominate local and regional startup conversations, and offering a forward-looking lens on where real value is being created.
The sixth edition comes at a particularly critical moment for Egypt’s and the region’s startup ecosystems. Market data point to rapid changes in funding structures, investor preferences, and startup priorities. Regionally, data published by Wamda indicate that startups in the Middle East and North Africa raised approximately USD 3.5 billion during the first nine months of 2025, including USD 900 million in equity funding and USD 2.6 billion in debt financing. These figures reflect a year defined more by selectivity than celebration, as capital is increasingly allocated based on the resilience and sustainability of business models rather than growth alone. Within this context, Saudi Arabia continued to capture the largest share of regional funding.
In Egypt, the picture reflects a combination of resilience and recalibration. Despite market fluctuations, Egypt has maintained its position as one of Africa’s most active startup hubs, demonstrating that periods of volatility often lead to a reordering of priorities rather than a loss of momentum.
This is where the value proposition of “Where Are the Opportunities?” becomes most evident. The platform is designed to analyze market shifts as they emerge. During its fifth edition in 2024, the concept of “opportunities” was framed not as a broad narrative but as investable and executable sectors, including digital transformation, renewable energy, and agri-tech. The event recorded more than two million views across social media platforms, extending its impact far beyond the physical venue and into the wider entrepreneurial public discourse.
Previous editions also contributed to building a cumulative body of insights focused on future regional market trends, offering practical approaches for developing more resilient business models amid currency volatility and rising capital costs. A consistent theme has been the importance of achieving local market success as a foundation for sustainable regional expansion.
The platform has also been recognized for raising issues ahead of their mainstream adoption, particularly in financial technology and adjacent sectors. In discussions moderated by Hussein El Manawy in earlier editions, topics such as inflation, interest rates, consumer debt, and risk management were examined early on in the context of installment-based commerce. These conversations anticipated the regulatory and sustainability debates that now sit at the heart of the region’s Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) ecosystem.
Other forward-looking discussions included the growth potential of B2B marketplaces in Egypt, the rise of second-hand goods markets as a rational response to import constraints and price inflation, and a critical assessment of remote education that distinguished between ambition, readiness, and infrastructure. Fintech, in particular, was positioned as a long-term strategic play, contingent on strong ideas and disciplined execution, an early reading that helps explain its recurring appeal to investors during recovery cycles.
Building on this foundation, the sixth edition in 2026 represents a logical accumulation rather than a sudden shift. It revisits the core question: where does technology translate into real value, and where does hype turn into a bubble? Artificial intelligence takes center stage not as a buzzword, but as a new operational layer reshaping productivity, customer experience, and product development speed. In parallel, BNPL and embedded finance re-emerge as more mature narratives, connected to earlier discussions around installment models, risk management, and consumer awareness, but now supported by stronger data, governance frameworks, and financial integration.
Commenting on the upcoming edition, Hussein El Manawy, Business Development Advisor and Managing Director of Startup Grind Cairo, said that the sixth edition aims to realign the entrepreneurial conversation around what truly matters. He stressed that “Where Are the Opportunities?” was never designed as a conventional event, but as a platform for understanding market transformations and anticipating genuine opportunities. El Manawy also revealed ambitions to evolve the initiative into a leading content production platform, inspired by global models such as TechCrunch, to further support Egypt’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
He added that since its inception, the platform has consistently addressed key business environment variables at an early stage, focusing on practical discussions that help companies convert economic and technological shifts into operational advantages and build more sustainable business models amid rising costs and intensifying competition.
For his part, Mohamed Nagaati said the real impact of “Where Are the Opportunities?” lies in its ability to connect macroeconomic context with the day-to-day decisions of company building and operations. He noted that markets have moved through multiple phases in recent years, shifting from rapid growth to discipline and efficiency, a transition that requires continuous reassessment of what truly works in practice.
Nagaati emphasized that the platform’s core objective is to help entrepreneurs and decision-makers distinguish between passing trends and opportunities that can be built and sustained. He underlined that success is less about following prevailing narratives and more about execution, impact measurement, and the ability to demonstrate real value.
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. “Where Are the Opportunities?” remains a space that matures questions before answers, reinforcing a central truth of entrepreneurship: opportunities are not only discovered, they are created when deep market understanding meets disciplined execution.