Ismael Belkhayat
The story
Ismael Belkhayat is a Moroccan entrepreneur who graduated from ESCP's Master in Management programme in 2008 and worked as a strategy consultant at Boston Consulting Group. He and his wife Sophia Alj, a former McKinsey consultant, noticed that their local shopkeeper in Casablanca had to leave customers waiting whenever a supplier's van arrived. In 2020 they launched Chari, an app that lets neighbourhood shops order the goods they resell for next-day delivery without leaving the counter. Chari became the first Moroccan startup in Y Combinator, joining the Summer 2021 batch, and by October 2021 Tunisia was already its second market. Grocery distribution earns thin margins, but it gave Chari the daily trust of shopkeepers who ran their businesses in cash. Chari built its payment technology in-house and in October 2025 became the first venture-backed Moroccan startup to receive a payment institution licence from Bank Al-Maghrib, allowing shops to offer phone top-ups, bill payments and money transfers. It closed a $12 million Series A, the largest in Morocco, co-led by SPE Capital and Orange Ventures.
