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Mubawab, a free classified ads website which focuses on Middle East and North Africa, has raised $850,000 in funding from leading Spanish web consortium Grupo Intercom and several international angel investors.

Mubawab first launched in July 2010 and currently attracts thousands of user-posted classified ads daily from 17 countries in MENA with around 600,000 unique visitors per month.

Mubawab's CTO Shadi el-Hajj commented on the rapid growth and obstacles facing e-commerce in the region saying: “(The Arab online market) is maturing faster than the underlying economic infrastructure. For example, many countries in the region don’t have reliable street addresses but yet demand for location-based services is emerging. This often creates the need to really think outside the box with the technical solutions we go for.”