Belal El-Megharbel
The story
Belal El-Megharbel left a family business and later worked at Careem, where he was general manager for Cairo and Alexandria. He noticed that corner shops in lower-income neighbourhoods often paid more for the same groceries, because products passed through four or five wholesalers, each adding a margin. In November 2018 he left Careem and founded MaxAB with Mohamed Ben Halim, starting from a small warehouse on the outskirts of Cairo, a couple of trucks and a team visiting shops daily to earn their trust. They built an app letting shopkeepers order stock for next-day delivery, and by 2021 more than 55,000 retailers were using it, when MaxAB raised a $40 million Series A. Delivering groceries is costly, but supplying thousands of shops gave MaxAB data on what each one bought and how often, which it used to lend. The combined MaxAB-Wasoko has disbursed over $20 million in working capital loans with repayment above 99%, and he now leads it as sole CEO.
By the numbers
Their company
EgyptRetailMaxAB
B2B grocery ordering and embedded finance for small retailers, now merged with Wasoko
