September 28, 2026

Are you a failed founder from MENA?

This issue is a startup-graveyard tour ahead of Halloween, because we do like our traditions. I have analyzed eight MENA startups that had raised real money, built real products, and still didn’t make it. Each could turn into a miniseries – OSN, you in?

In one case, the founders even returned part of the money to investors. TradeHub’s Ahmed Gaber and Ahmed Atef should teach a masterclass in being noble…By the way, the title of this email is not a hook. We are seriously looking for failed founders from MENA. And if you failed in fintech, email us right now, because we’ve got a job for you. You can read the issue later.

One more thing: been a rough few months to be a VC in MENA?🥴 Take this anonymous sentiment study, see how you compare with other VCs, and get the full report back. (Survey by Mal Filipowska and Dominika Malhas)

The MENA Startup Graveyard (and who walked out alive)

Hayvn · Fetchr · TradeHub · Shgardi · Capiter · Awok · The Modist · CashU

Hayvn
A $12 million regulatory takedown

In 2018, institutional investors wanted crypto exposure but feared unregulated exchanges. Ex-investment bankers Christopher Flinos and Ahmed Ismail launched Hayvn out of the ADGM to fix that, promising a rock-solid, fully compliant ecosystem spanning OTC trading, custody, and payments. For years, Flinos was the slick public face of the brand, preaching compliance as the company’s core DNA.Then the curtain fell. Following Flinos’s sudden resignation, the ADGM’s regulator dropped a massive hammer in April 2025. Investigators exposed staggering violations: Hayvn had bypassed licensing limits, failed AML protocols, and funneled hundreds of millions through an unlicensed shell company. Worse, Flinos had personally fabricated documents, including fake contracts with Kenyan crypto brokers and falsified invoices for German wind farms (!), to hide crypto transactions. The group was hit with a $12.45 million fine, its licenses were torn up, and Flinos was banned from the ADGM. He quietly retreated to Australia, pivoting completely away from digital assets to work as a suburban mortgage broker in Melbourne. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Fetchr
From a $300 million valuation to an unpayable $100 million tax bill

Well, you’re not from the region if you haven’t heard this one already.Picture this: it’s 2012, and roughly 4 billion people worldwide don’t have a formal street address, the Middle East included. Idriss Al Rifai’s fix was almost embarrassingly simple: ship to a GPS pin instead of an address. It worked. Fetchr raised $50+ million, hit a $300 million valuation in 2017, and Forbes dubbed it “The Next Desert Unicorn.” Then growth outran everything else. By 2019 the company was warning investors its finances were “rapidly diminishing.” It narrowly survived a $10 million restructuring round in December 2019, but the final blow came in the summer of 2021: a disputed $100 million Saudi tax bill from ZATCA. The claim stemmed from a structural crackdown on how gig-economy platforms calculate VAT for independent contractors. The scale of the fine completely eclipsed Fetchr’s cash, forcing its top backer, BECO Capital, to warn investors in October 2021 that the startup was insolvent and heading toward liquidation. Al Rifai left in January 2020 right after the restructuring round. He landed at Glovo running strategy and data, helping take it from 8 countries to 25 before its $2.2 billion sale to Delivery Hero, then started building Flow48 in 2022 (financing for SMEs). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

TradeHub‍
When knowing when to let go means returning the capital

Most founders don’t get a second act. Ahmed Gaber’s second act was the failure. Bosta, the logistics company he co-founded in 2017, now operates across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE and is considered one of the most successful startups in the region (possibly the first tech-logistics IPO on the Egyptian Exchange). He left voluntarily and relocated to London to start TradeHub in 2023, a cross-border B2B marketplace co-founded with Ahmed Atef. It pivoted to sales-automation SaaS, backed by $1.4 million from Concept Ventures, TLcom, and Armyn Capital. Eighteen months and two pivots later: still no product-market fit. In September 2025, Gaber did something almost nobody in this region does: shut it down and handed the unspent capital back to investors. “Knowing when to let go is just as important as knowing when to push forward,” he wrote on LinkedIn. It seems like both Ahmeds are taking a break right now (or building in stealth). [1, 2, 3]

Shgardi
Once a potential listing on Nomu, shut down by a price-dumping war

Launched in late 2019 by Abdulaziz Al-Mousa and Tarek Dahab, Shgardi was Saudi Arabia’s ambitious homegrown answer to global on-demand delivery giants. Al-Mousa, who previously ran a marketing agency, designed a flexible, Glovo-like sharing-economy app that allowed users to order anything to their doorsteps. Backed by a high-profile seven-figure investment from Mad’a Investment Company, the startup experienced a staggering pandemic-era explosion, watching its user base scale from 100,000 to 1 million in just two months. The app rapidly expanded across 35 cities, eventually processing over 7 million orders through a massive network of over 300,000 freelance couriers. By late 2021, they even appointed financial advisors to map out a public listing on the Saudi Nomu market. Then the ground shifted. In October 2025, the parent company (Safari for Trading and Marketing Co.) abruptly announced a permanent shutdown, citing a “scorched earth strategy” from heavily capitalized, foreign-backed competitors. The final blow was aggressive price undercutting that local players simply couldn’t match. [1, 2, 3]

Failed a fintech startup lately? We got a job for you. Click here.

Capiter
From Egypt’s next FMCG giant to a messy corporate boardroom coup

For a minute, Capiter was Egypt’s breakout story. $33 million Series A in 2021, a claimed path to $1 billion in annualized revenue, and a real shot at owning FMCG distribution for the country’s corner stores. By the end of 2022, staff weren’t getting paid, and the board fired both founders-brothers (Mahmoud & Ahmed Nouh) for “inability to fulfill their fiduciary duties.” That’s corporate-speak for a fight nobody’s fully explained publicly. What followed was messy and very public: unpaid salaries, angry LinkedIn posts, unproven social-media claims that the brothers had fled with company funds, while the brothers denied any wrongdoing and said in October 2022 they’d filed a lawsuit with the public prosecutor’s office against the company’s board of directors over their firing. One detail that reads differently in hindsight: Mahmoud had already been a co-founder of Swvl, the ride-hailing unicorn that would go on to have its own very public reckoning a few years later. Today, Mahmoud seems to be building in stealth, while Ahmed co-founded the consultancy Ollandis in 2023. [1, 2, 3]

Awok
Closing for ‘sanitization’ and a Reddit expose

Ulugbek “Bek” Yuldashev bootstrapped Awok for six years on $30,000 of his own savings before raising a $30 million Series A in 2019 – one of the region’s largest ever. Except, per two former employees, the second $15 million tranche never arrived. Meanwhile the business of “buy inventory on credit, sell fast, repay later” had piled up debt it couldn’t service; some vendors hadn’t been paid in over a year, while a handful of executives reportedly kept collecting their own salaries. In March 2020, Awok told staff its offices were “closing for sanitization.” The company was actually shutting down. The CEO left the UAE that same month. Awok went dark for months, still technically taking orders, until a Reddit thread forced its hand: Awok confirmed closure in September 2020, blaming Covid-19. Former employees say that wasn’t the real reason. In 2025, Yuldashev founded the social networking platform PingTop. [1, 2, 3, 4]

‍The Modist‍
‍
‍From the ultimate luxury backing to a quiet pandemic-era shutdown

‍Founded in 2017 by Ghizlan Guenez, who previously worked at the now-collapsed PE firm Abraaj. The Modist raised $15 million in 2018 led by Vaultier7 (UK’s first female-led PE fund), with Dubai’s Chalhoub Group also in the round. A year later came the real headline-grabber: Nicola Bulgari, Vice Chairman of Bulgari Group, personally invested through his own PE vehicle, alongside Farfetch. By early 2020, the company had been quietly struggling for six months, unable to close a Series B round it needed to survive. When it shut down in April 2020, it blamed a “global crisis” (Covid-19), but the outlet that broke the story was explicit that the pandemic was likely cover, not cause. Guenez went on to found the entrepreneurship platform F Force in 2022. [1, 2, 3, 4]

+1 footnote inside a legendary success story:

CashU

Every “failed founders” list needs the one that complicates the premise. Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury didn’t need a second act – they’d already had two. Maktoob sold to Yahoo for $175 million in 2009. Souq.com, grown under the same umbrella, sold to Amazon for $580 million in 2017. CashU – their digital wallet – wasn’t so lucky. Sold off in December 2015 in what’s called the Middle East’s first management buyout, it drifted under new owners: a forced move to Singapore for regulation, then Saudi Arabia banning its cards outright in 2016 over money-laundering fears. It clawed back in 2017, then quietly died by 2022 with frozen accounts, withheld funds, and no real announcement. The founders were long gone, busy building Jabbar Internet Group and backing the region’s next generation of entepreneurs. [1, 2, 3, 4]

^^ Proof that even the best portfolio has one that doesn’t make it.

TL;DR

Eight MENA startups that raised real money and still didn’t make it: Hayvn, Fetchr, TradeHub, Shgardi, Capiter, Awok, The Modist, and CashU (the one that proves even legends have a dud).  Causes range from funneling hundreds of millions through an unlicensed shell company to unpayable tax bills, brutal price-dumping wars, and boardroom warfare.  Most founders went on to build new platforms or launch their own consultancy. A few completely retreated.Also, we’re hunting for more failed chapters – especially in fintech, so if that’s you, let us know, because we got a job for you.

See you in October,

Hasan

Family Postcard

Announcements from Money 20/20 Riyadh:
Hala announced 10+ partnerships and agreements including Alinma Bank, stc bank, and Salla
Nearpay partnered with 6 entities including Barq, Digital Pay, and SeaPay
Zid partnered with 5 entities including STC Bank, Arab National Bank, and Barq
Yasmina has 3 new partners: Qoyod, Jisr, and Alinma Bank
Qoyod signed an MoU with Bank Albilad and partnered with Masdr and Yasmina
Merit Incentives signed an MoU with Moyasar

+
🏆 Merit Incentives won Best B2B Product or Service at the Gift Card & Voucher Association (GCVA) Hall of Fame Awards 2026 in London
🏆 TruKKer received the Best Workplace Practices Award at the Asia Pacific HRM Congress Awards 2026
🚐 Swvl launched a 24/7 shuttle network in Madinah
✒️ Klaim partnered with Lean Technologies and Sadq
📺 Money Fellows' founder Ahmad Wadi spoke to Asharq Bloomberg about expansion to Morocco

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