Arabnet Arabnet

Offerna.com, Egypt’s first group buying website, has recently welcomed Dr. Amr Awadallah, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Silicon Valley big data company Cloudera, Inc, on board its investment team.

“Even though Egypt is going through a political transition stage right now, which some would consider too risky for investment, I was very impressed by the stellar founding team assembled at Offerna and the traction they are getting such that I couldn't resist making an investment,” said Dr. Amr Awadallah.

Amr is Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Cloudera, Inc. the leading big data company in Silicon Valley. Before Cloudera Amr was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners - one of the premier venture capital and growth equity financing firms in the world. Prior to that Amr served as Vice President of Engineering at Yahoo!, where he led the Business Intelligence and Data Analytics teams for a number of Yahoo!'s flagship products. He also co-founded VivaSmart in June 1999, which Yahoo! subsequently acquired in June of 2000 to be the main catalog management system powering its shopping service.

“We are thrilled to have Amr Awadallah on our investment team. This step further solidifies our position in disrupting the region’s e-commerce. Amr’s Silicon Valley expertise is the perfect addition to the team at this stage”, commented Abdullah Assal,Offerna.com CEO.

Earlier this year, Offerna.com received funding in the form of a Series A investment made by the Technology Development Fund (TDF) which is managed by Ideavelopers, an EFG-Hermes Private Equity subsidiary, as well as an investment by industry pioneer Youssri Helmy, who has co-founded successful enterprises such as ITWorx and Swan Labs, and is currently Chairman of IdealRatings.