ImpactAlpha, May 10 — Former engineers Iliana Montauk and Laila Abudahi launched Manara last year to offer coding classes for engineering students from Arabic and English-speaking countries.
Manara has raised $3 million to train 6,000 students per year, half of them women, up from 60 a year currently.
Graduates have gone to work at big tech companies like Meta (formerly Facebook) and Google; they pay 10% of their salary in the first two years on the job. Abudahi said she became an engineer in Palestine and “wanted to make it easier for people back home to do the same.”
Stripe led the pre-seed financing round. Participating investors include LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, YCombinator’s Paul Graham and other angel investors. Manara will use the capital to expand training on interviewing and networking.
