Abu Dhabi-based Anghami will become the first home-grown Middle East tech company to list on the New York stock exchange after merging with Vistas Media Acquisition Company in a deal that values the music-streaming service at $220 million.
Anghami, which translates in Arabic to ‘my tunes’, announced on Wednesday that the deal had been struck with Vistas, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which is one of the biggest investment into a Middle Eastern technology start-up in recent years.
Co-founder Elie Habib told Arabian Business: “Listing on the Nasdaq is very important for us. It’s the biggest capital market in the US and the biggest for tech. It enables us to open up the opportunities in growing the company by raising more capital and being exposed to different companies and being able to play in the worldwide territory, which just puts us in a different field.”
The deal includes a combined $40m commitment from UAE-based Shuaa Capital ($30m), which has over $14 billion in assets under management, and Singapore-based Vistas Media Capital ($10m), in PIPE (private investment in public equity) financing.
Founded in Lebanon in 2012 by Habib and Eddy Maroun, Anghami has grown to become one of the region’s leading music streaming platform, offering more than 57m songs to more than 70m registered users with around one million streams per month.
The company has grown revenues 80 percent over the last three years and is expected to increase five-fold over the coming three years.
Maroun told Arabian Business: “We think that we’re at the phase where we want to fulfil our growth and you need access to capital. On top of that we believe the opportunities that are in the market today are relevant to our stage of growth, that’s why we believe this is the best timing, especially when we look that Covid is behind us.”
The transaction is scheduled to close in the second quarter of this year and the company is expected to have around $142m of cash on its balance sheet, which will be used to fuel additional growth, including plans to capitalise on the global Arabic-speaking population of more than 450m people.
“If you look at the catalogue that we have, one percent of our catalogue is Arabic, while the consumption of this is around 50 percent of the whole consumption. This tells you that there’s a huge lack of local content and there’s demand,” said Maroun, who revealed further plans were to tap into other emerging markets as well as to invest in new verticals, with capabilities for live concerts and podcasts.
SPACs have become increasingly popular and are often formed to allow private companies to raise fresh funds to grow and list directly without having to go through the costly and time-consuming initial public offering process.
“Clearly with Vistas, with the SPAC idea, it came to fruition and it just makes sense to us that we are ready right now to do this and we are ready to grow in a way that is sustainable, but at the same time public, without requiring us to simply sell out the company and move on,” said Habib.
“We’re not going anywhere. We’re just moving along with a bigger, bolder vision, with much more resources to execute that,” he added.
Anghami relocated its headquarters from Lebanon to the UAE capital earlier this year through a partnership with Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) and boasts a workforce of 120 with plans to increase that by 25 percent over the next two quarters.
“It’s a very exciting day. We’re happy to be here and it’s chapter two for us. We’re super-charging our growth,” said Habib.
Anghami signed a deal last year with OSN’s streaming service Wavo, which included the rights to stream the final season of hit TV series “Game of Thrones.”
Follow us on
