Manara, an engineering education platform for women in the Middle East, announced it raised $3 million in pre-seed funding on Monday. The round was led by Stripe and includes participation from tech bigwigs like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, Lean Startup’s Eric Ries and Careem’s Mudassir Sheikha.
Manara co-founder and CTO Laila Abudahi was inspired to start the company after her own experience trying to find a high-paying job in engineering.
“I grew up in Palestine and realized quickly that to become a world-class engineer I needed to work on highly scaled products with experienced teams,” Abudahi said in a statement. “After I reached my dream through lots of trial and error, I wanted to make it easier for people back home to do the same. Ultimately, these engineers will become the CTOs and senior developers that the region needs in order to accelerate the growing success of its own tech ecosystem.”
The digital platform enables a cohort-based approach to learning for software engineers and computer scientists. In addition to training students in desired tech fields, the community also offers mentorships and networks from world-class tech professionals.
“Communities can be extremely powerful if you are smart about how to curate and connect them — the trick is knowing when one hour of a Google engineer’s time has the highest leverage,” Iliana Montauk, Manara co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.
So far, the approach has been successful. According to Manara, its users have increased their salaries by 300 percent after using the platform. And 86 percent of engineers from Manara’s latest cohort received job offers within five months of graduating, more than half of which were at FAANG companies.
The fresh funding will be used to scale Manara’s user reach. Currently, it serves 60 engineers per year with hopes to scale to 6,000 in the near future.
Manara also plans to launch a self-service product for interview practice to further support its graduating users’ success in the job market.
