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| AFP photo |
At first glance, Mashvisor is just one of thousands of websites specializing in U.S. real estate. But it has a unique feature, undetectable to customers: Its designers created it in the West Bank and it is run from the Israel-occupied Palestinian territory.
โThe great thing about a start-up is you can work on it anywhere in the world. You can be in Palestine, you can be in Cambodia, Vietnam, China. It doesnโt matter,โ explains Peter Abu al-Zolof, who founded Mashvisor more than a year ago with a friend.
Last week, Mashvisor became the first Palestinian company to get the support of the influential American 500 Startups venture capital fund.
It is one of a number of Palestinian start-ups in the occupied Palestinian territories, long overshadowed by Israelโs so-called โStart-up Nation.โ
The online platform automates and analyses U.S. real estate data nationwide to find investors the best property deals.
As in Silicon Valley, the staff dress casually, drink coffee from state-of-the-art machines in garish colors, and pad through the office wearing U.S.-made headphones around their necks.
But working in the West Bank brings unique challenges.
In October 2015, a wave of violence broke out across Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Abu al-Zolofโs friend and founding partner Mohamed Jebrini, who lives in Hebron, found himself stranded in the city as roads were closed, 45 kilometers from their Ramallah offices.
โHe was stuck in Hebron and I was stuck in Ramallah and we were still working on our company,โ explains Abu al-Zolof.
And the American-Palestinian says the online nature of what they do means they can avoid many of the frustrations for other companies in the West Bank, where the Israeli army checkpoints often present very physical challenges to commerce.
โThere are no walls, there are no challenges, there is nothing that can stop this kind of thing,โ he says.
โItโs a virtual market, so there are no checkpoints where they tell you: โYou canโt sell this. You canโt take this out of the country.โโ
The company benefited from the support of the Ramallah-based Leaders, an organization that helps nurture start-ups.
Shadi Atshan, Leaderโs director general, told AFP that in the start-up scene there was โno unemployment — unlike almost all other industries and economic sectors in Palestine which have high unemployment.โ
โThose with good skills can earn a very high income.โ
The unemployment rate in the occupied Palestinian territories is 27 percent, according to figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
The Ibtikar investment fund has invested around $800,000 in ten start-ups so far, according to its executive director Ambar Amleh. She stresses their work is not charity.
โThis isnโt work that should be funded by donors or grants. The expectations of making money should be there from the beginning because we are creating companies,โ she told AFP.
Palestinians are still a long way behind Israel, where companies in Tel Avivโs start-up scene regularly sell for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
In 2013, Google bought the Israeli traffic app Waze for more than $1 billion, a figure unimaginable in the Palestinian scene.
But Amleh points out the huge government support for Israeli start-ups, which donโt exist in the Palestinian territories.
โI think more and more people are starting to see that they really can make something they have been dreaming about come true.โ Hussein Nasir al-Din and his partner Laila Aqal have a business inextricably linked to the conflict – monitoring the security situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The Red Crow website, run out of a small office in Ramallah, monitors security developments and sends real-time alerts and maps to clients.
Their customers include U.N. agencies, diplomats and organizations that operate in the field and adjust their security programs according to events.
Soon they want to expand to the Egyptian and Iraqi markets.
