StonePine ACE Partners – a joint venture between StonePine Capital Partners and ACE & Company SA – today announced its investment alongside CI Capital Holding for Financial Investment (“CI Capital”) in Taaleem Management Services Company SAE (“Taaleem”) a leading higher education platform in Egypt which controls and operates Nahda University in Beni Suef (NUB), for a total consideration of US$73m.
The Founder and CEO of StonePine Capital Partners and the head of the StonePine ACE Fund, Youssef Haidar will also represent on the board of NUB said “We are incredibly proud of closing our second deal out of our StonePine ACE Fund this year. This deal represents a continuation of our investment strategy of teaming up with reputable investment companies regionally to target attractive assets in our verticals of interest. We believe in the promise the Egyptian market represents and in higher education as a sector with excellent upside appeal. We believe that our partnership with CI Capital to invest in NUB will yield excellent returns to our investor base.”
Sherif Elhalwagy, Managing Director at ACE & Company said “We are very proud to be successfully executing our first investment in the promising Egyptian education sector alongside CI Capital. StonePine ACE will be augmenting CI Capital and NUB’s management team in enhancing its offering to students to enable them to continuously achieve gainful employment upon graduation. We are proud of this mission and the investment we have made to support it.”
Taaleem Chairman and CEO Mohamed El Rashidi added “We would like to welcome the StonePine ACE fund and its co-investors as new shareholders in Taaleem. We are confident that the StonePine ACE Fund will provide us with full support to accelerate Taaleem’s next wave of growth, further cementing our position as one of the largest institutionally-backed education platforms in Egypt.”
Taaleem is a leading higher education platform that controls and operates NUB, the largest private university in Upper Egypt with more than 5,600 enrolled students; it was born on the back of extensive Egyptian government reforms to the education sector that have encouraged private sector investment over the past several years.
The university’s location in Beni Suef enables students from this highly populous and under served region to gain access to high quality education and state-of-the-art teaching methods.
In addition to its existing six faculties, NUB recently launched the Faculty of Medicine for the upcoming academic year 2019/20, in partnership with the Medical University of Vienna International, one of the world’s largest and most renowned medical universities with roots dating back more than 750 years. NUB’s Faculty of Medicine is Upper Egypt’s only private medical faculty and one of only a handful nationwide.
