Abjjad, the Jordanian Arabic library that provides unlimited access to thousands of Arabic books and novels, has raised a $1 million Series A funding round through Rimal Capital, JordInvest and ISSF.

The Abjjad platform offers users unlimited access to over 6000 Arabic e-books and novels, where they can rate, review, and add books to reading shelves, follow writers, and stay up-to-date with their latest work, amongst other features. Abjjad’s current offering is $5.99/month and currently has 1.5 million registered readers and writers.

The newly raised funds will be used to invest in users and e-books acquisition where both are supported with ongoing investments in product and technology. Abjjad is looking to become the biggest digital Arabic library and the highest revenue-generating platform for Arabic authors and publishers while providing users with the best digital reading experience. 

Founded by Eman Hylooz who has prior experience in the IT, digital marketing, and market research field, Ajjbad specializes in helping lost readers get convenient and affordable access to books. The platform also helps unrecognized authors reach publicity, and publishers who are under the risk of extinction to become scalable and up to date with the new technology trends. Hylooz created Abjjad to help tackle this issue of linking readers to books and publishing houses, and create a social reading platform for readers, writers, and publishers.

“We at Abjjad, consider ourselves lucky to have onboard strategic investors that will take the company to the next level, we are very excited about the next stage and we already are witnessing at the very moment the growth within our team, our users, our publishers, and our beloved writers.”

Eman Hylooz, Founder and CEO of Abjjad commented,

Striving to meet the needs and tastes of all Arab readers, Abjjad works continuously on adding more books of different genres from stories and novels, to biographies and self-help books. While only 3% of internet content is Arabic, Arabic speaking users on the internet are the 4th largest in the world. With 180M users and 3 out of 4 being frequent book readers, they are aiming for the platform to reach 20 million Arabic-speaking users. 

They work with leading Arab publishing houses and writers to digitize their books and enable them to be published on the platform, driving new revenue streams and increasing their readers’ base. Abjjad believes that digital publishing for Arabic books is lagging behind the rest of the world, and it has become their mission to solve this, alongside switching the Arabic world from piracy and PDFs to copyrighted versions with good user experience.