Idriss: Joy came with an amazing background: she had already experienced a fund raise in the Silicon Valley and managed to exit the company and got acquired. Since being founded in 2012 with a cloud technology platform and digital-only approach, Fetchr has disrupted the traditional supply chain model. By: Caroline John - Published: September 24, 2020 at 7:36 am. I know at least three of them in Saudi. We’ve also changed our website, our social media channels and our messaging. She has been named the “Zen Master of Marketing” by Entrepreneur Magazine and the “Millennial Master of the Universe” by FastCompany.com. We raised 1.2 m usd for our seed round. What we are doing at fetchr is unique, nobody in the world works on the type of issues of problems we work on both mathematically, operationally or technically. Heuristic simply means allowing people to learn or discover something for themselves. We are far from being “traditional”. After more than 15 years of hard work he managed to sell his company to Amazon a few months back. It’s what we do. A creative space can serve as an incubator of ideas and imagination, and the modern office, through the use of aesthetics, layout, and technology, should be heuristic. I think the biggest challenge that remains here is the high costs associated with launching your business- from license fees, to visas to dealing with all the paper work before you can even begin! In the process, the startup has secured $52 million in funding with $41 million of it coming in its Series B round earlier this year. Idriss: Being a tech start-up in the Middle East can be an uphill battle sometimes, especially back in 2012 when Fetchr was first founded. There is a significant learning curve in the delivery industry and I believe Careem will have to catch-up with this. Open communication is also a key part of our culture here. Safety and business continuity during COVID-19. Idriss Al Rifai co-founded Fetchr with Joy Ajlouny in 2012 to solve the ‘no-address’ problem of Middle East. I believe that the initial hype around outsourced model and the “uber of” faded down and what matters more now is the economics of the deal, the business model. Integrated multi-function design is the hallmark of an empowered office environment. Karachi-headquartered travel platform FindMyAdventure has raised $600,000 in a pre-Series A round from a... Roamer, a Pakistani transportation startup has launched country’s first self-drive electric bike rental service... Karachi-based healthtech MedznMore has raised $2.6 million in a seed round, it announced in... Cairo-based logistics startup Illa (ILLA) has raised $500,000 in a seed round from Averroes... Tag, a yet-to-launch Pakistani fintech has been granted in-principle approval by the country’s central... Bahrain-headquartered fintech Tarabut Gateway has expanded to the United Arab Emirates with the launch... Dubai-based adtech startup FoxPush has secured $15 million from JGroup, a Lebanese holding company... Khobar-based yet-to-launch on-demand car maintenance services startup Garage has raised $260,000 in an investment... Singapore-based venture studio High Output Ventures launched an accelerator program HOV Accelerate earlier this... Egypt’s startup ecosystem has grown multiple folds in the last few years both in... MENAbytes covers tech and digital media stories from Middle East North Africa. Shama Hyder is CEO of Zen Media, which turns brand moments into momentum, a best-selling author, and an internationally renowned keynote speaker. A tech and startup enthusiast based in Lahore, Pakistan. Omar, Hassan and I – all of us did deliveries to our end customers. How’d she become the Co-Founder? That being said, “work” is not “work” when you are with friends and building something that everyone is excited about. Idriss: Prior to starting Fetchr, I was heading operations at Marka VIP, a leading e-commerce company in MENA back in the day.