Forbes Middle East - English Issue - October 2020

BILLIONAIRE

MENA STARTUP COVID-19 CASUALTIES

THE RISE AND RISE OF TYLER PERRY

STARTUP

SUPPORTERS

MENA’S MOST ACTIVE FUNDS AND ACCELERATORS

HISTORY’S MOST EXPENSIVE STARTUP FAILURES

OCTOBER 2020 ISSUE 98

Halan Co-founders Ahmed Mohsen

Mounir Nakhla

Mohamed Aboulnaga

Total investment: $23.5 million

50 THE MIDDLE EAST'S

OCTOBER 2020 ISSUE 98

MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS

MEET THE ENTREPRENEURS GROWING THROUGH THE PANDEMIC

BY ATTRACTING MILLIONS IN INVESTMENT.

OMAN........................................................ OMR 3

BAHRAIN.................................................... BHD 3

UAE.............................................................AED 30

OTHERS..............................................................$8

KUWAIT.................................................. KWD 2.5

SAUDI ARABIA.......................................... SAR 30

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6 I Sidelines Silver Linings

By Claudine Coletti

I LEADERBOARD

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I Booked Up

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Fodhil Benturquia’s Dubai-based doctor appointment booking platform Okadoc is foraying into telemedicine as the local healthcare industry embraces new technology solutions.

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I Billionaire Startup Supporters I History’s Most Expensive Startup Failures I MENA Startup COVID-19 Casualties I MENA’s Most Active Funds And Accelerators In 2020

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By Samuel Wendel

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I On The Go

With their startup, iKcon, cloud kitchen entrepreneurs Khalid Baareh and Kareem Abughazaleh are vying for a slice of a fast-growing space in Dubai and beyond.

By Samuel Wendel

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I Cleaning Up

Kuwait’s JustClean is ironing out problems in the Middle East’s laundry business, using technology to help bring yet another offline industry into the digital age.

By Samuel Wendel

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I THE PROFILE 88

I The Rise And Rise Of

Tyler Perry

From “poor as hell” to billionaire: how Tyler Perry built an entertainment empire and changed show business forever.

By Madeline Berg

I FORBES LIFE 94

I Our Jordan Is Paradise: Top Tourist Destinations

Jordan is world-famous for captivating visitors with its vibrant cities, modern culture, and ancient monuments.

By Fouzia Azzab

I THOUGHT LEADERS 14 I AI Needs To Grow Up And Stop Chasing Its Long Tail By Shalini Verma 70

I Market Narratives And The Current Optimism

By Hussein Sayed F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

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I Serving The Underserved

Egypt’s Halan is poised to become the region’s next super-app. But co-founders Ahmed Mohsen, Mounir Nakhla, and Mohamed Aboulnaga have more than money in sight—they want to empower the masses.

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Photo by Ihab Mohamed (www.eghstudio.com) for Forbes Middle East

By Claudine Coletti

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INSIDE

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iMile

Naveen Joseph

iMile

Rita Huang

RIZEK

Traveazy Group

Abdallah Abu Sheikh

Geet Bhalla

eKar Vilhelm Hedberg

Okadoc

Fodhil Benturquia

sehteq

sehteq

Noor AlKamil

Saif AlJaibeji

50 THE MIDDLE EAST'S

MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS MEET THE ENTREPRENEURS GROWING THROUGH THE PANDEMIC

BY ATTRACTING MILLIONS IN INVESTMENT.

F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

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presents 5

unlock a new world of opportunities GBMUNLOCKDX.COM F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

#UNLOCKDX2020 OCTOBER 2020

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Silver Linings

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or startups, any disruption in business that could interrupt cashflow is a scary time.

Young businesses are much more vulnerable than established players—they are often not yet profitable and lack the capital buffer needed to survive bad times. Some have proved more vulnerable than others in this strange and challenging year, with closures, such as e-commerce retailer The Modist, being announced as early as April. Another shock closure announcement came from e-commerce platform Awok in September, just over a year after it had secured $30 million in funding. Every shut down serves as a reminder that following an entrepreneurial vision comes with risk, and there are never any guarantees, even with multimillion-dollar backers behind you.

However, while this year has been a bumpy ride for most business leaders, some startups have actually sailed through, and some—especially those in the technology sector—have had one of their best years since establishing their business. This is especially true for delivery services and online marketplaces, but also health-tech, fintech, and generally any tech broadly making people’s day-to-day lives a little easier or more entertaining. With lockdown causing a paradigm shift towards staying in, working from home, and doing all things online, our addiction to apps is at an all-time high.

In January, MAGNiTT reported that it expected MENA’s startups to raise up to $1 billion in 2020. Looking back, that may have been a conservative estimate. Even considering the curse of COVID-19, which hadn’t properly hit the region back when MAGNiTT made its prediction, it’s impressive to note that just 29 of the varied businesses that make up our list of the Middle East’s 50 Most-Funded Startups have been able to raise more than $425 million so far this year alone, with more likely to come in before we finally get to say goodbye to 2020. MAGNiTT reported that MENA startups raised a total of $659 million just in the first half of 2020. This is a good sign. Investors are interested, and they’re willing to bet on future growth.

In fact, this year has been extremely successful for some. The most-funded startup on our list, Pure Harvest Smart Farms, raised a huge $110 million in April alone—it had previously raised $25.8 million in 2017. The agriculture technology business uses high-tech greenhouses to grow fruits and vegetables, enabling countries with harsh climates to be able to grow their own produce and rely less on imports, while using significantly less water. Elsewhere, cloud kitchens company Kitopi raised $60 million this year to help it expand its network of cloud kitchens in the U.S. and globally—it had previously raised $29 million since it was established in 2018. Both companies are expanding in growing markets, presenting attractive prospects to investors.

I hope you enjoy learning more about these young businesses and the entrepreneurs behind them. It’s an inspiring sign that even the most challenging times can create opportunities.

—Claudine Coletti, Managing Editor

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OCTOBER 2020 ISSUE 98 Dr. Nasser Bin Aqeel Al Tayyar President & Publisher Khuloud Al Omian Editor-in-Chief Forbes Middle East, CEO - Arab Publisher House khuloud@forbesmiddleeast.com Claudine Coletti Managing Editor

Ruth Pulkury Senior Vice President - Sales

claudine@forbesmiddleeast.com

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Laurice Constantine Digital Managing Editor laurice@forbesmiddleeast.com Fouzia Azzab Arabic Editor fouzia@forbesmiddleeast.com Jamila Gandhi Reporter jamila@forbesmiddleeast.com Samar Khouri Online Editor samar@forbesmiddleeast.com Waleed Hmidan Video Journalist waleed@forbesmiddleeast.com Amany Zaher Quality Assurance Editor amany@forbesmiddleeast.com Cherry Aisne Trinidad Online Reporter aisne@forbesmiddleeast.com Research Team Jason Lasrado jason@forbesmiddleeast.com Ahmed Mabrouk ahmed@forbesmiddleeast.com Nermeen Abbas nermeen@forbesmiddleeast.com

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LEADERBOARD • BILLIONAIRES

By Jamila Gandhi

While the ultra-rich frequently and famously make headlines for their stakes in hot tech stocks and billion-dollar conglomerates, some also pour their money into the startup ecosystem.

Here are some billionaires who’ve invested in startups this year, all of whom also began their entrepreneurial journey as startup founders themselves.

Yuri Milner

Yuri Milner

Notable startups: Weee!, Instacart, BYJU’s, Revolut Funding: More than $1 billion Net worth: $4.4 billion Serial investor Yuri Milner’s investment firm DST Global backed at least 10 startups in 2020. Most recently, the Russian billionaire poured $35 million into Weee!, a Californiaheadquartered e-grocer that offers Asian specialty products and daily staples. DST Global also invested $225 million in US-based e-grocer Instacart’s venture round and $122 million in Indian ed-tech BYJU’s.

However, the startup that received the most from the fund is British fintech Revolut, who received $500 million in a Series D round by DST.

Eduardo Saverin Startup: Antler Funding: $50 million Net worth: $15.1 billion

Photo by Steve Jennings / Getty Images via AFP

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Billionaire Startup Supporters

Startup generator and early-stage VC Antler received $50 million from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in a Venture Round in January. A Brazilian native and now Singapore resident, he also launched venture Net worth as of September 15, 2020 F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

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Oprah Winfrey Startups: Oatly, Apeel Sciences Funding: $450 million Net worth: $2.5 billion Media mogul Oprah Winfrey has invested in two food sector startups this year: $250 million into plant-based protection company Apeel Sciences in its Series D round in May; and $200 million into vegan milk alternative Oatly in a venture round in July. The former news anchor bought a 10% stake in Weight Watchers in 2015 (since lowered to 7%) and is a brand ambassador for the weight loss and wellness lifestyle program.

Jay-Z

Photo by JEFF PACHOUD / AFP

Startup: Impossible Foods Funding: $500 million Net worth: $1 billion Hip-hop’s first billionaire, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, invested $500 million into Impossible Foods in a Series F round in March.

Established in 2011, the Silicon Valley meatalternative startup has raised $1.5 billion since inception and counts Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and singer Katy Perry among its roster of investors. Jay-Z is also a co-founder of Marcy Ventures Partners, an investment vehicle that raised an $85 million fund in 2019.

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Bill Gates

Jeff Bezos Startups: Beacon, Nautilus, Sana, Mindstrong, NotCo Funding: $976 million Net worth: $186 billion Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos—the world’s richest person—poured $15 million in British logistics startup Beacon in a Series A round in June.

Established in 2018, the supply chain finance firm offers real-time data of cargo delivery. Through his family investment office, Bezos Expeditions, the billionaire has also invested in biotech firms Nautilus ($76 million) and Sana ($700 million) this year, as well as mental health pioneer Mindstrong ($100 million) and plant-based food alternative NotCo ($85 million).

Peter Thiel Startups: Luminar, EnClear Therapies, AbCellera Biologics, ATAI Life Sciences, Honcho Funding: $313 million Net worth: $2.1 billion

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has backed five startups in 2020. The tech billionaire’s most significant investment was valued at $170 million to driverless car startup Luminar in a Venture Round, where Thiel was the lead investor.

The serial investor has also poured money into healthcare startups EnClear Therapies ($10 million) and AbCellera Biologics ($105 million), as well as psychedelics firm ATAI Life Sciences ($24 million), and most recently in September, software firm Honcho ($4 million).

Vinod Khosla Notable startups: Quaise, Coda, Arevo Funding: More than $3.7 million Net worth: $2.5 billion A venture capitalist by trade, Vinod Khosla has invested in one firm independently and over

Bill Gates Startups: Impossible Foods, Evolv Technology, Kymeta, Cerevance, Kallyope, Memphis Meats Funding: $933.2 million Net worth: $116.1 billion Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has funded six startups so far this year.

The tech billionaire’s most significant investment was valued at $500 million to meat-alternative startup Impossible Foods in its Series F round. Gates also added $30 million to his investment last year in Evolv Technology, bringing his total contribution to $54 million. Other notable funding included antenna connectivity platform Kymeta ($85.2 million), pharma startup Cerevance ($45 million), gut-brain biotech Kallyope ($112 million), and cell-based meat firm Memphis Meats ($161 million).

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9 BILLIONAIRES

10 though his firm Khosla Ventures. In June, Vinod invested $6 million in Quaise, an energy company pioneering millimeterwave drilling technology to access deep geothermal energy. His company’s most significant funding this year is also the most recent investment, valued at $80 million to work collaboration software Coda in a Series C round on August 11. On the same day, Khosla Ventures also invested $25 million in 3D printing startup Arevo in its Series B round.

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fund B Capital, with Boston Consulting Group and Bain Capital veteran Raj Ganguly.

The fund has raised $766 million so far and invests in late-stage firms in Asia, Europe, and the U.S.

LEADERBOARD • STARTUPS

By Jamila Gandhi

There are no guarantees when it comes to business, even with money behind you.

Here are five of the most-costliest and biggest startup failures, which crash-landed despite raking in over $500 million in funding, according to CB Insights.

LeSports Select VC investors: HNA Capital, Caissa Travel, Zhongtai Securities, Fortune Link Total disclosed funding: $1.7 billion HQ: Mainland China Established in 2014, cashstrapped startup LeSports shut down four years later because of overdue rent.

In its best days, the sports streaming arm of LeEco had media rights for 300 major sporting events globally, including Formula 1, the English Premier League, and the NBA. In 2017, fresh capital in a Series B round valued the company at $3.49 billion. Nevertheless, due to forking out more than they could afford, the Hong Kongbased startup’s revenues were just a fraction of their costs.

Solyndra Select VC investors: Redpoint Ventures, US Venture Partners Total disclosed funding: $1.2 billion HQ: U.S. Founded in 2005 by Christian Gronet, solar panel startup Solyndra F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

Brogan BamBrogan

was the largest failure among venture-backed companies when it filed for bankruptcy in 2011.

As per the Congressional Research Service, Solyndra was planning to drive down its costs by scaling up its operations with backing from the U.S. government. In 2011, the startup defaulted on a $535 million loan guaranteed by the Department of Energy.

As per the deal, private investors—like family funds connected to the Obama fundraising bundler George Kaiser—would be paid

back before the government if Solyndra collapsed.

The company’s failure is attributed to the falling price of traditional solar panels and the costs of polysilicon.

Arrivo Select VC investors: Plug and Play Ventures, Trucks VC Total disclosed funding: $1 billion HQ: U.S. Hyperloop startup firm Arrivo was founded by SpaceX engineer and former Virgin Hyperloop One co-founder, Brogan BamBrogan, in 2017. Instead

of a high-speed transit underground, the company aimed to build an aboveground Hyperloop-style transportation system. The startup’s vehicle was intended to use magnets to zoom down a track at about 200 miles per hour, with a plan to apply it for transporting cargo and personal vehicles, according to The Verge. Arrivo officially folded in December 2018, when it could no longer secure new funding. In October 2019, Reddit-born hyperloop and engineering collective rLoop bought the intellectual property of Arrivo for an undisclosed amount.

Jawbone Select VC investors: Khosla Ventures, Andreesen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Kuwait Investment Authority, BlackRock.

Total disclosed funding: $929.9 million HQ: U.S. Launched in 1999, Jawbone was originally named AliphCom and specialized in military-grade audio technology. In 2011, it pivoted to become a consumer electronics startup and entered OCTOBER 2020

Photo by John GURZINSKI / AFP

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History’s Most Expensive Startup Failures

LEADERBOARD • ECONOMY

Better Place

Photo credit: Khawarjunjoi2 / Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Select VC investors: VantagePoint Capital Partners, Lend Lease Ventures Total disclosed funding: $675.3 million HQ: Israel Electric vehicle company Better Place was established in 2007 to help end the global auto industry’s reliance on oil to sell millions of electric vehicles by 2020. Founder Shai Agassi ultimately overpromised and under-delivered on his mission, ignoring the waning interest and market rivals. The company chose smaller countries to deploy its model, but due to mounting upfront costs, the debut kept delaying. In 2013, the ambitious electric-car network’s third CEO, Dan Cohen, said there was no option but to file for liquidation and to request the appointment of a provisional receiver “to find the best way to minimize the damage to its employees, customers, and creditors.”

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The pandemic has reportedly negatively impacted 71% of MENA startups. Of those, 22% have suspended operations, and 21% have witnessed a substantial decrease in demand.

The COVID-19 pandemic has left the global startup ecosystem vulnerable.

According to a report from the Startup Genome, the world’s startup economy generates nearly $3 trillion in value, and COVID-19 could prove a “mass extinction event” for these young firms.

Since the crisis engulfed the globe, 72% of the world’s startups have witnessed a plunge in their revenues, with the decline averaging 32%. The travel and tourism sector was the most affected, suffering a 70% fall in sales, while beauty and fashion startups saw their AWOK's founder Ulugbek Yuldashev revenue drop by 59%, as per the report.

Online luxury startup The Modist was one such fatality to the pandemic. The e-commerce business’ founder Ghizlan Gunez announced she was closing her startup’s virtual doors in early April. Based in Dubai, The Modist went live on International Women’s Day in 2017. Backed by local retail giant Chalhoub Group and London-headquartered e-tailer Farfetch, the startup had a successful run of almost three years in the booming $484 billion modest fashion market before shutting shop.

“We regret to inform you that the global crisis that has hit the world has left our young business vulnerable with no option but to cease operating,” the company said in a statement. The Modist was once home to over 130 brands that served over 120 markets globally and had grown 200% since inception.

In another shock announcement, Dubai-based e-commerce platform Awok announced its closure in September due to the current adverse business environment across the globe. The permanent closure comes more than a year after raising $30 million in its first external round of financing from a venture between StonePine Capital Partners and ACE & Company and Al Faisaliah Ventures—the newly-formed Corporate Ventures Capital arm of Al Faisaliah Group. Established in 2013 by Ulugbek Yuldashev, Awok. com offered around 300,000 products in over 50 categories in at least 120 countries, employing over 700 people. The now-defunct platform used to attract approximately 10 million monthly visitors.

“After seven incredible years of saving money for our customers by creating regional business and a platform for our suppliers and sellers, we are sad to inform you that given the current global situation it left the company no other choice than to close its platform for good,” a statement on Awok.com said. Before its closure, the company had plans to expand in Saudi Arabia.

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MENA Startup COVID-19 Casualties

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the public sphere as a wireless technology manufacturer, under the stewardship of CEO Hosain Rahman. It produced items like Bluetooth speakers, fitness trackers, and headsets. The company faced competition from rivals in the wearables market, including Apple, who offered some of the same tracking measures in the Apple Watch, and Fitbit, who was selling similar goods for lower prices.

High-profile funding from VC firms had lifted the firm’s valuation to $3.2 billion in 2014.

Despite raising close to a billion dollars, Jawbone failed in 2017 and announced the liquidation of its assets due to years of bugs, errors, and overfunding.

LEADERBOARD • STARTUPS

By Jamila Gandhi

MENA’s Most Active Funds And Accelerators In 2020 MENA startups raised a total of $659 million in the first half of 2020, marking a 35% year-on-year increase, according to MAGNiTT’s H1 2020 MENA Venture Investment Report. Investments in the same period led to 251 deals, down 8% from H1 2019.

These investments came from a total of 144 institutions—33% of which had never previously invested in the region before, and 31% of which came from outside of the MENA region. Here are the leading regional investors and accelerators who made 10 or more disclosed investments in MENA startups in the first half of 2020.

Most Active Funds In MENA

I Oman Technology Fund (OTF)

I 500 Startups San Francisco-based 500 Startups is an early-stage seed fund with Middle East operations in Bahrain. With a primary focus on consumer and SMB internet startups, the venture capital firm’s mission is to discover budding talent and help build scalable businesses in the thriving global startup ecosystem. The firm’s initial investment size is generally between $25,000 to $250,000.

GitLab, Grab, Canva, and Reddit are some of the unicorns that 500 Startups has invested in.

In May 2020, 500 Startups and Misk Innovation hosted their first-ever Digital Demo Day to mark the end of the third cohort of the Misk500 Accelerator Program for 16 high-caliber startups. Since the partnership and launch of the Misk500 Accelerator in January 2019, 53 pre-seed and seed-stage startups across three batches have graduated from the program.

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The OTF is an innovation hub for national and international entrepreneurs, providing them with an array of services, including a three-month training program, mentorship, and funding. OTF has a total committed capital of up to $150 million to invest in related incubators, accelerators, and global VC programs.

In 2020, OTF invested $1.3 million into Cairobased e-commerce platform Homzmart and contributed undisclosed sums to Tunisia’s Galactech and Felix in the U.A.E.

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I OQAL Angel Investors The first angel investor community in Saudi, OQAL Angel Investors, was launched in 2011 to support the growth of the region’s SMEs. Since its inception, OQAL has funded the growth of several GCC startups, including photographer’s marketplace Sawerly and Dubai-based ride-hailing app Careem.

In August, OQAL announced a tie-up with Flat6Labs, which will enable the Saudi-based incubator to gain access to Flat6Labs’s portfolio of 260 select companies. Similarly, OQAL will aid these startups to leverage its investor network to expand its businesses to other countries.

Most Active Accelerators In MENA

I Flat6Labs Cairo Established in 2011 as the first Flat6Labs office in the MENA region, Flat6Labs Cairo’s bi-annual cycle provides seed capital of $31,000 to $46,000 in funding to around eight new startups for up to 10% equity. Software company Instabug remains a famous success story for the program even eight years later. The bug-reporting tool has secured clients like PayPal, Lyft, and Vodafone and raised $1.7 million from Accel in 2016. This year, the Egyptian startup secured $5 million in a Series A round, making it the largest funding round a Flat6Labs startup has raised.

I Flat6Labs Tunis Flat6Labs Tunis, a partnership between Flat6Labs, BIAT, Tunisian American Enterprise Fund, Meninx Holding, and Le15, is a startup seed program and an early-stage fund launched in 2016 to help aid the growth of Tunisian startups and the country’s venture capital industry.

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Last year, it secured an investment of $1 million from IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, in its Anava Seed Fund to help support tech entrepreneurs and female entrepreneurs in particular. In 2020, FlatLabs Tunis graduated its fifth cohort, which included startups operating in spaces including automobiles, robotics, and 3D printing. Each participant received $65,000 and support through the accelerator’s network of professional experts and mentors.

I Flat6Labs Bahrain In 2018, Flat6Labs launched Flat6Labs Bahrain, its sixth addition to its portfolio of startup accelerator programs in the MENA region, in partnership with Tamkeen. The program aims to accelerate the growth of local and international startups in Bahrain. Since its inception, Flat6Labs Bahrain has invested in over 36 startups, creating over 100 full-time jobs.

Companies in its fifth cycle cover a variety of sectors, including social networking, ed-tech, construction, and virtual reality.

I Misk 500 MENA Accelerator In 2019, Saudi-based Misk Innovation introduced its growth program—Misk Growth Accelerator—for startups in the MENA region and a preaccelerator program—Misk 500 Accelerator—for pre-seed and seed-stage startups. In collaboration with 500 Startups, the accelerator graduated its third batch of companies in May 2020.

Of the last batch of graduates, 16 companies came from countries including Saudi, the U.A.E., and Jordan, representing sectors like health-tech, physical wellbeing, and employment agencies.

The innovation subsidiary sits under Misk Foundation, a charitable organization aimed at supporting the kingdom’s youth, launched in 2011 by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and US-based 500 Startups. The partnership helps accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship by drawing on Silicon Valley growth techniques to young MENA-based companies, helping them scale and fundraise.

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• THOUGHT LEADERS •

By Shalini Verma, CEO of PIVOT technologies

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AI Needs To Grow Up And Stop Chasing Its Long Tail Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved based on deep neural networks, which are modelled on our brain structures and have an insatiable appetite for data. We throw massive amounts of training data at the network layers. Over time, the network learns how to sift through its own output and correctly identify the data.

AI has made enormous strides in recognizing objects and speech. Facebook recognizes faces in a class reunion photo and even locates the school in which it was taken. But it still cannot draw correlations or infer why a bunch of people have congregated to take that photo with the school as the backdrop. Amazon’s Alexa, by advances in natural language processing, can follow orders. But the users, too, have to adjust their language to what Alexa understands, as though they are talking to a child.

We are trying to make machines think like us, but human intelligence is multi-faceted, which is shaped by its constant interactions with our multidimensional world. There is plenty of common sense that we take for granted. A three-year old child can very quickly learn to distinguish between milk, water and chocolate milk. But a deep neural network will take significant training to do so.

Right from the start, AI has found it hard to do the easy things. There is a general consensus that deep neural networks as we know them today have inherent limitations in generalizing reasoning, whereas the human mind has a tremendous capacity to do this.

Imagine that your Tesla is zipping down the road and a rhino appears from nowhere and charges at the vehicle. The training data must cover such a rare scenario because deep learning cannot generalize.

Deep learning is hard to apply to larger scheme of things. This is why a fully autonomous car is still work-in-progress because of the risk of the long tail

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of edge cases. Tesla cars that are moving on the road are connected with the real world, ingesting huge amounts of raw data to constantly help the e-automaker train its models.

The deep neural network has been constantly chasing its long tail. Before deep learning became a thing, symbolic AI was the poster child of AI. IBM Watson used symbolic AI. It relied on imitating human knowledge in a declarative form—a combination of facts and rules such as the mountain is tall, we climb mountains.

Symbolic AI converts symbols into expressions and manipulates them to create new expressions. But it is difficult to scale it up for conditions that we ourselves do not understand well. Deep neural networks are great for perception training of robots that fetch toiletries for you in your hotel room. However, it is seeing a diminishing rate of return despite high volume of research. The industry now is attempting to combine both deep neural networks and symbolic AI—neuro-symbolic AI promises to be this middleground.

Rules-based Symbolic AI is more abstract and therefore can draw inferences and correlations from a large set of data. The neural network is great at pattern recognition by crunching large data sets that humans cannot do, which can then be made more abstract with symbols such as numbers. Deep learning can be used to train on sensory data like the reunion photo.

That can then be used by the symbolic system to build rules-based abstractions.

We already have a huge knowledge base in areas such as finance and sciences that can be transformed into logical rules. Researchers are exploring how to embed those formulae into neural networks to make them more effective. Until then, a child will reason better than Alexa.

OCTOBER 2020

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OCTOBER 2020

50

16 THE LIST

THE MIDDLE EAST'S

MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS

A

s the COVID-19 pandemic intensified in the first half of 2020, the Middle East’s startup ecosystem was forced to adapt to meet the changing landscape.

However, while the outlook might have seemed grim, many startups were able to find opportunities for growth, especially in online markets.

Investors’ appetites have shifted the direction of funds to create a new wave of startups from sectors such as fintech, agri-tech, prop-tech, transport, delivery, restaurant platforms, and cloud kitchens.

The businesses on our list of “The Middle East’s 50 Most-Funded Startups 2020” have raised more than $959 million in combined total funding.

More than half of that funding was secured by the top 10 startups, amounting to around $546 million.

More than half of the startups (29) were able to shake off the challenges posed by the pandemic and raise funding in 2020. Together they raised more than $425 million in funding this year. We expect that figure to increase by the end of the year, as many startups are currently in the middle of closing funding rounds.

The U.A.E. has the most active startup ecosystem, with 33 of the 50 startups headquartered

in the emirates. Saudi Arabia comes in second with seven startups headquartered there. Egypt is home to four, Jordan to three, Lebanon for to two, and Kuwait to one.

U.A.E.-based startup Pure Harvest Smart Farms tops the list after it secured $135.8 million to fuel its ambitious expansion plan. Nana, an e-grocery marketplace platform, is the highestfunded Saudi startup on our list after it raised a total of $28.9 million from investors.

The most active investors in our list were 500 Startups, RAED Ventures and Wamda Capital, with investments in 10, eight, and seven startups, respectively.

Among the 50 startups, eight were co-founded by women, including Rita Huang from logistics service provider iMile, Nadine Mezher from online financial advisor Sarwa, and Nadine Nehme from AI-based health advisor Medicus AI. Methodology In order to qualify for the list, startups had to be no more than seven years old. They had to have raised at least $5 million in total funding from external investors, excluding founders’ shares and loans.

Cut off for funding was September 25, 2020.

To nominate yourself or someone else for our lists, email: info@forbesmiddleeast.com

F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

OCTOBER 2020

Meet the entrepreneurs growing through the pandemic by attracting millions in investment. iKcon

Khalid Baareh

Swvl

Mostafa Kandil

Carswitch Imad Hammad

Almentor.net

iKcon

Almentor.net Ihab Fikry

Ibrahim Kamel

Kareem Abughazaleh

Sarwa

F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

OCTOBER 2020

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

Nadine Mezher

THE MIDDLE EAST'S

50 MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS 1 Pure Harvest

Smart Farms

Founders: Mahmoud Adi, Robert Kupstas, Sky Kurtz Technology-enabled agribusiness

Funding: $135.8 million Investors: Wafra International Investment Company, Shorooq Partners Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2016

Pure Harvest uses controlled-environment agriculture technology to produce fresh fruits and vegetables in high-tech greenhouse facilities. According to the company, it currently produces over 20 varieties of tomatoes and six varieties of strawberries, among other things. Co-founders Robert Kupstas and Sky Kurtz met through the Stanford University alumni network in 2016—Mahmoud Adi joined the team in the same year. The company received seed funding in 2017, and in March 2018 it began constructing its first high-tech greenhouse in Abu Dhabi. In April 2020, Pure Harvest announced a Series A funding round of $110 million led by Wafra International Investment Company. It now has plans to expand to Kuwait.

Image from Source

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2 Swvl Founders: Mostafa Kandil, Ahmed Sabbah Mass transit system

Funding: $92 million Investors: Vostok, Beco Capital, MSA, Autotech, Blustone, Endeavor Catalyst, Oman Tech Fund, Arzan VC, Sawari Ventures , Michael Lahyani, DiGAME, Silicon Badia, Raed Ventures, Dash Ventures, Esther Dyson, Emilian Popa, Onsi sawaris and Africa legal network Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2017

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

Since its launch in 2017, bushailing app Swvl has built a network of over 600 lines in Cairo and Alexandria, and recently launched in Kenya and Pakistan. Swvl enables riders heading in the same direction to share fixed-route bus trips for a flat fare up to 70% cheaper than other ride-hailing apps. In 2019, the company secured one of the largest Series B rounds in the region, with $42 million raised. The company plans to use the funding to expand its global position and bring the service to more markets that suffer from an inadequate public transportation infrastructure.

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3 Kitopi Founders: Andres Arenas, Bader Ataya, Mohamad Ballout, and Saman Darkan Managed cloud kitchen platform

Funding: $89 million Investors: Lumia Capital, BECO Capital, CE-Ventures, GIC, Global Ventures, Wilshire Lane Partners, Rise Capital, Reshape, Venture Souq, Knollwood Investment Advisory, MSA Capital, HB Investments, Crescent Enterprises Venture Capital Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2018 Kitopi operates 30 kitchens across the U.S., Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., the U.K. and Kuwait, and partners with more than 120 restaurants. Some of its clients include Operation Falafel, Pizza Express, Right Bite and UNDER500. In 2020, the startup raised $60 million from investors including U.S.-based Lumia Capital, which previously invested in Careem. Kitopi says it will use this funding to open 50 more locations in the U.S. and 100 globally by the end of 2020. Co-founder Mohamad Ballout also co-founded confectionery business BMB, while Saman Darkan was the Digital Transformation Director of Dubai-based architectural and engineering consultancy ARC International.Â

4

SellAnyCar.com Founder: Saygin Yalcin Online marketplace for used cars

Funding: $50 million Investors: Sanabil Investments, Gulf Investment Corporation, Olayan Financing Company, IMENA Group Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2013 SellAnyCar.com raised $35 million in 2020, bringing its total funding to $50 million, according to the company.

It plans to use the new capital to accelerate growth throughout the GCC, including opening 100 branches in Saudi Arabia, which could employ more than 300 Saudi nationals. Yalcin previously founded online private shopping club, Sukar.com, which was later sold to Amazon’s Souq.com.

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Image from Kitopi; Saygin Yalcin's Photo by Raja for Forbes Middle East

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5 Traveazy

Group

Founders: Geet Bhalla, Mohammed Bin Mahfouz, Digvijay Pratap Online Muslim-friendly travel agency

Funding: $40 million Investors: Accel Partners, F&C Investments, Al Sanie Group, Abanumay, Gobi Ventures, Global Ventures, Algebra ventures, Others Headquarters: U.A.E.

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

Established in: 2013 Dubai-based Traveazy Group offers Umrah and leisure packages with Muslim-friendly attributes to its B2C and B2B customers through its two brands “HolidayMe” and “UmrahMe.” UmrahMe, launched in 2018, has become one of only three companies authorized by the Ministry of Hajj & Umrah to sell Umrah products to global travel agents, capturing 70% of Traveazy’s revenue shares. The group services more than two million travelers annually with a presence across more than 75 countries and offices in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India and Singapore, according to the company.

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50 MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS

6 Bayzat Founders: Talal Bayaa, Brian Habibi Digital provider of insurance and HR solutions

Funding: $31 million Investors: BECO Capital, Precinct Partners, RAED Ventures, Delta Partners Group, WOMENA, Point 72 ventures, Elm, Greyhound Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, Tech Invest Com., Mubadala, Silicon Badia and an undisclosed investor Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2013 Bayzat provides automated human resource services for businesses, including payroll, employee benefits, and insurance benefits.

In October 2019, it announced a Series B funding round of $16 million led by Point72 Ventures and Mubadala. The company has raised a total of $31 million to date, with plans to invest the proceeds into technology and customer experience. Last year, the company released additional features including free payroll processing, EarlyPay, Attendance, and Doctor Bookings.

7 TruKKer Founders: Gaurav Biswas, Pradeep Mallavarapu Digital freight platform

Funding: $30 million Investors: STV, IFC, World Bank, Riyad Taqnia Fund, Endeavor Catalyst, Shorooq Ventures Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2016 TruKKer operates road freight in four countries in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia representing its largest market, according to the company. Today it has more than 22,000 trucks in its network and services more than 350 businesses across the region. In 2019, TruKKer secured $23 million in a Series A funding round from investors including STV and the World Bank, according to the company. Co-founder Gaurav Biswas previously served as director of AECOM, which delivered projects such as Yas Mall and the Warner Bros theme park in Abu Dhabi.Â

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Image from Source, Bayzat Photo by Raja for Forbes Middle East

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8 Nana Founders: Sami Alhelwah, Ahmed Alsamani, Abdulmajeed Alsukhan, Bakr Elsherif e-Grocery marketplace platform

Funding: $28.9 million Investors: MEVP, STV, Saudi Venture Capital Company, Watar Partners, Wamda Capital, others.

Headquarters: Saudi Arabia Established in: 2016

Since its launch in 2016, Nana has established itself as a leading e-grocery marketplace in Saudi Arabia, serving 14 cities across the kingdom. According to the company, it has tripled its turnover over the past year, as well as partnered with major supermarkets such as Carrefour, Panda, Spar, Farm Superstores and Manuel. In 2020, Nana raised $18 million to further expand across Saudi Arabia and internationally. It aims to deliver 100,000 orders every month to Saudi-based buyers by the end of 2020. Co-founder Sami Alhelwah previously co-founded Sadeem, a cloud management solutions company.

9 PayTabs Founder: Abdulaziz Al Jouf Payments solutions provider

Funding: $26 million Investors: Saudi Aramco, other private investors Headquarters: Saudi Arabia Established in: 2014

Images from Source

PayTabs specializes in B2B payments solutions, and has so far processed transactions in 168 currencies across 49 industries, according to the company. Having secured a funding round of $20 million in 2017, PayTabs has focused on expanding across the MENA region, Southeast Asia, and several countries within Africa and Europe. It has offices in the U.A.E. and a presence in India, the Philippines and Bahrain. In 2019, the company set up operations in Egypt for the first time. It plans to launch its third product, PayTabs Switch, this year.

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10 Halan Founders: Mohamed Aboulnaga, Ahmed Mohsen, Mounir Nakhla Two and three-wheeler ride-hailing and e-commerce app

Funding: $23.5 million Investors: Battery Road Digital Holdings, Algebra Ventures, MNT Investing, UTT, Shaka Capital, MEVP, TEXILA. Headquarters: Egypt Established in: 2017

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Halan operates its two and three-wheeler ride-hailing app in Egypt and Sudan, with plans to expand to Ethiopia.

In 2020, it raised $14 million, bringing its total amount of funding to $23.5 million. In Egypt, the Halan app has also launched new verticals, including fast-food delivery, an e-payment solution for bills, an e-commerce platform, and peer-to-peer delivery. CEO Mounir Nakhla previously co-founded micro-financing firms Mashroey and Tasaheel. CCO Mohamed Aboulnaga is a former regional director at Careem, and CTO Ahmed Mohsen previously founded MusicQ and CircleTie. Uber’s founding CTO, Oscar Salazar, is a board member.Â

OCTOBER 2020

Photo by Ihab Mohamed (www.eghstudio.com) for Forbes Middle East

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P RO M OT I O N

OPPO Launches All-New Reno4 Series In The Middle East OPPO Enco W51 wireless headphones debut hybrid active noise cancelation, wireless charging and audio quality compensation algorithm.

O

PPO has launched its innovative Reno4 Series in the region, which not only delivers high-quality design but also enables a connected lifestyle for users. Recognizing the Middle East’s move into the 5G era at a higher pace than most other regions in the world, this new series boasts a 5G device— the Reno4 Pro 5G—as one of three smartphone variants, including Reno4 and Reno4 Pro. The latest generation of the Reno Series smartphones elevates photography and mobile entertainment, making it easy to capture creative portraits and imaginative videos.

Additionally, the global technology brand has launched its latest Enco wireless headphones—OPPO Enco W51—which are equipped with powerful hybrid active noise cancellation and more attractive features. The new

OPPO Enco W51 houses a new dualcore digital noise reduction chip and more advanced hybrid noise reduction microphones. They are intelligently optimised to detect and reduce everyday noises, with a noise reduction depth of 35 dB2, offering users an undisturbed listening experience.

The highlight of the Reno4 Series— the Reno4 Pro 5G—packs a powerhouse into a slim and sleek design. A unique gradient color in a combination of matte and glitter elevates the premium look and feel of the phone. Further enhanced by a gently curved 3D screen, Reno4 Pro 5G comes in two color designs, Galactic Blue and Space Black. Galactic Blue is crafted with a technique first introduced by the Reno4 Series called the “Reno Glow,” which provides a matte finish with subtle glittering details for a more vibrant and premium feel.

The scene-stealer for Reno4 Pro 5G is a suite of night video options powered by wider angle lenses, larger sensors, and zoom features, which enable users to take high-quality videos at night thanks to the ultra-night wide-angle video lens and ultra-night video algorithm. With the increasing popularity of short video platforms in the region, including Tiktok and Instagram stories, Reno4 Pro 5G offers innovative videography features to push the boundaries of creativity. A whole new suite of facial recognition and touch-free interactions are available on the Reno4 Series.

With OPPO’s best-in-class fast charging technology—65W SuperVOOC 2.0 Flash Charger—Reno4 Pro 5G smartphone’s 4000mAh battery can be fully charged in 36 minutes.

The Reno4 Series also introduces super power-saving mode and super nighttime standby.

The new Reno4 Pro 5G is configured with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G integrated 5G chip with 5G+Wi-Fi dual-channel acceleration for a faster experience. Both Reno4 and Reno4 Pro smartphones are powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G. The phones are now available across the Middle East. OPPO Enco W51 wireless headphones are available in the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Oman.

www.oppo.com

The thoughts expressed in this advertorial are those of the client. Forbes Middle East does not endorse any claims made or opinions expressed in this paid program.

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11 Sehteq Founders: Saif AlJaibeji, Noor AlKamil Digital health insurance

Funding: $23 million Investor: 971 Capital Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2017

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Sehteq offers low-cost health insurance plans to individuals and SMEs in the U.A.E. The company was founded in 2017, and has since amassed around 650,000 consumers and created a network of more than 2,200 providers, according to the company.

Co-founder Saif AlJaibeji is an experienced physician and executive, who acted as regional CEO for U.S.-based healthcare company UnitedHealth Group. Co-founder Noor AlKamil is also a physician and holds a master’s degree in microbiology and immunology from Harvard University. Sehteq raised $23 million from U.A.E.-based 971 Capital this year.

OCTOBER 2020

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

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50 MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS

12 ekar Founder: Vilhelm Hedberg Self-drive mobility platform

Funding: $22 million Investors: Polymath Ventures, Audacia Capital, Angel Investors Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2016

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

ekar was one of the first self-drive mobility operators in MENA, and provides over 2,000 cars to over 200,000 renters across the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, according to the company. Unlike traditional car rental companies, ekar customers only pay for how long they’re actually using the car, enabling them to pay by the month, day, hour, or minute via the ekar mobile app. The company raised $17.5 million in 2019. Founder Vilhelm Hedberg previously co-founded and later exited QMS Global FZ LLC, an ISO certification company.

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13 Noon Academy Founders: Abdulaziz AlSaeed, Mohammed Aldhalaan Online learning platform

Funding: $21.6 million Investors: Raed venture, STV, NFX, SVC, SFX, Alturky holding and angel investors Headquarters: Saudi Arabia Established in: 2013

Image from Source

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Noon Academy provides an online learning community that enables students to engage with peers and tutors. It offers virtual classrooms and live group study sessions. The Saudi startup has registered over 6.9 million students on its platform to date. Noon was first launched in Saudi Arabia, then Egypt, and has recently expanded to Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, and India. In June 2020, Noon raised $13 million in a pre-Series B funding round. It plans to connect 50 million students and tutors globally by 2023.

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14 JustClean Founders: Athbi and Nouri Al Enezi, Mohammed Jaffar Digital laundry service

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Funding: $20 million

THE LIST

Investor: Faith Capital Headquarters: Kuwait Established in: 2016 JustClean is a door-to-door online laundry service that connects customers to laundries, while managing delivery, quality control, and other administrative services.

It has received all its $20 million in funding from Faith Capital, which is led by Mohammed Jaffar. Jaffar also founded Talabat, which was acquired for $170 million by Rocket Internet.

Today, JustClean works with over 300 laundries across five countries, and employs over 150 people. Brothers Athbi and Nouri Al Enezi were also featured in Forbes Middle East’s 30 Under 30 list in 2020.

14 Lucky Founders: Ayman Essawy, Marwan Kenawy, Momtaz Moussa Instant discounts application

Funding: $20 million Investors: Undisclosed Headquarters: Egypt Established in: 2018

Images from Source

Lucky is a consumer mobile app that provides instant discounts on brands, clothing, and electronics, as well as cafes and restaurants. Its partners include KFC, Hardee’s, Pizza Hut, RayBan, CenterPoint, New Balance, CAT, Samsung, and LG. It has raised $20 million in funding so far, of which $15 million was raised in 2020 alone.

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16 Beehive Founder: Craig Moore SME-focused digital finance solutions provider

Funding: $18 million Investors: Riyad Taqnia Fund, Cultiv8, DIFC, Angel investors Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2014 Beehive is a peer-to-peer lending platform, regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority. It provides digital finance solutions for SMEs, financial institutions and investors. Since its launch, businesses have borrowed more than $162 million through the company, with more than 12,000 investors registered on the platform.

The Dubai-based startup closed a funding round of $6 million in 2020, led by Riyad Taqnia Fund and DIFC, which brings its total funding to $18 million to date.

17 Sprii Founder: Sarah Jones Online marketplace for parents

Funding: $15 million Investors: Undisclosed Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2015 Sprii offers a wide selection of everything a parent might need, including clothing, accessories, toys and appliances.

It was founded in 2015 by British entrepreneur Sarah Jones who previously worked as an assistant manager at Deloitte Middle East. Sprii has raised three funding rounds, amounting to $15 million, with its last round of $8.5 million in 2019. It plans to expand in MENA, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain.

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Image from Source, Beehive Photo by Raja for Forbes Middle East

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18 Okadoc Founder: Fodhil Benturquia Online doctor-appointment booking and telemedicine platform

Funding: $12.3 million Investors: ADIO, Ithmar Capital Partners and others Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2018

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

Dubai-based Okadoc enables patients to find nearby doctors, book appointments and read reviews online. The company also has a footprint in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Founder Fodhil Benturquia was previously the CEO of Noon Group and general manager at Souq.com Saudi Arabia. Okadoc closed a $10 million Series A round in 2020 following a $2.3 million seed round in 2018.

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19 Adzily Founders: Ahmed Ashoor, Mostafa Hendawy, Mohamed Ossman Smart ads network

Funding: $12.2 million Investors: Al-Tharawat, Mostafa Kamshish Headquarters: Egypt Established in: 2019

Photo by Ihab Mohamed (www.eghstudio.com) for Forbes Middle East

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Adzily is an Egyptian company that operates digital out-of-home advertising screens in the Middle East. The company has so far secured $12.2 million in funding from Saudi Arabian private equity firm Al-Tharawat, and it plans to use this to expand in Egypt, as well as Saudi Arabia. According to the company, it operates over 300 screens, works with over 50 brands, and partners with clients such as Vodafone Egypt and Careem. It is currently installing 3,000 screens across 68 Cairo metro stations. Adzily media screens are also used in Swvl vehicles to offer entertainment to passengers. Cofounder Ahmed Ashoor also founded ENTLAQA in 2013, an e-learning company specializing in human resources and marketing solutions.Â

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20 NymCard Founder: Omar Onsi

Funding: $12 million Investors: B&Y, Phoenician Funds, M1 Group, Shorooq Partners Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2018 NymCard is a payment issuer and processor platform that provides physical, virtual, or tokenized cards for financial institutions, banks, and Fintechs. The startup was founded in Beirut and has an office in London, but in June 2020, it announced that it was relocating its headquarters to the U.A.E. to support its regional expansion plans. NymCard has partnerships with Visa and Mastercard. In October 2019, NymCard and INC Iraq, in collaboration with Visa, launched digital-only payment card Neo in Iraq.

Omar Onsi previously founded Nymgo S.A.

21 Telr Founder: Khalil Alami Online payment gateway

Funding: $11.8 million Investors: iMENA, Innovation East Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2014

Images from Source

Telr allows merchants to accept payments online.

First established in Dubai, the company now has offices in India, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. Telr also has banking relationships in Egypt and Pakistan, as well as a partnership with one of Indonesia’s largest telecommunications companies, according to the company. Founder Khalil Alami has more than 20 years of experience in the financial sector and payments industry.

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Modern cloud-based card issuing and processing platform

50 MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS

22 eyewa Founders: Anass Boumediene, Mehdi Oudghiri Online eyewear store

Funding: $11.1 million Investors: GS Shop, Wamda Capital, EQ2 Ventures, Nuwa Capital, 500 startups, Faith Capital, Angel investors Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2017 eyewa is an eyewear e-commerce platform, currently available in the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia. The company raised $2.5 million in funding in 2020, bringing its total funding to $11.1 million. Co-founders Anass Boumediene and Mehdi Oudghiri previously worked together as strategy consultants at Bain & Company in Dubai. They also both co-led global food delivery startup Foodpanda’s Middle Eastern unit as managing directors before the company’s acquisition by Delivery Hero in 2016.

23 CarSwitch Founder: Imad Hammad Online marketplace for used cars

Funding: $10.3 million Investors: Glowfish Capital, 500 Startups, DAI, Movelum, Equitrust, B&Y, and other investors Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2016

Image from eyewa; Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

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CarSwitch is an online marketplace for used cars in the U.A.E. that handles the entire process for the seller and buyer.

It employs a fleet of certified specialists and uses cutting-edge technology to inspect, certify, and warranty every car, vet buyers, match them with sellers and guide them through the full transaction. Sellers pay a service fee.

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Almentor.net Founders: Abdelrhman Fahmy, Ihab Fikry, Hesham Heikal, Ibrahim Kamel, and Husni Khuffash Online video-based continuous learning platform

Funding: $10 million Investors: Mohamed Elamin, Sawari Ventures, Egypt Ventures, Endure Capital Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2016

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

Almentor.net offers video courses and motivational talks in Arabic and English.

It currently has 70,000 users from 42 countries, over 160 mentors, and two studios in Dubai and Cairo. In December 2019, Almentor partnered with the Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University. Other partnerships include WUZZUF, Wamda, ITMEA, and others.

Co-founders Ihab Fikry and Ibrahim Kamel previously worked at ExxonMobil, while Hesham Heikal previously worked at PwC.

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24 iMile Founders: Rita Huang, Naveen Joseph, Gao Wenli Logistics and courier services provider across the Middle East and China

Funding: $10 million Investor: Undisclosed Chinese venture capitalist Headquarters: U.A.E., KSA & China.

Established in: 2017 iMile’s delivery services include cash on delivery, last mile delivery, international transport, and warehouse facilities. It was first launched in the U.A.E. and China in June 2017 and expanded to Saudi Arabia in 2018.

Before starting iMile, CEO Rita Huang was previously the CTO of Alibaba Joint Venture in Dubai and a country manager for Huawei.

Co-founder Naveen Joseph was formerly a manager at Amazon. In March 2020, the company raised $10 million in a pre-Series A funding round, led by a China-based venture capital firm. The proceeds will help the startup roll-out its services to Egypt, Kuwait and Morocco in a push for regional expansion.

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24 iKcon

37 THE LIST

Founders: Kareem Abughazaleh, Khalid Baareh Tech-focused cloud kitchens operator

Funding: $10 million Investors: Undisclosed Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2019

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

iKcon operates cloud kitchens, which cook and deliver food on behalf of restaurants, extending the reach of food and beverage brands. The company currently operates 12 cloud kitchens across the U.A.E., with plans to expand to Saudi Arabia in 2020 and other Middle Eastern countries throughout 2021. CEO Khalid Baareh comes from a background in mergers and acquisitions and management consulting, whereas COO Kareem Abughazaleh previously founded Foodie Brands. iKcon raised $5 million in 2020, bringing its total funding to $10 million.Â

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24 Tamatem Founder: Hussam Hammo Mobile games publisher

Funding: $10 million Investors: Wamda, Raed Ventures, Vision Ventures, DNC ventures, Al Faisalyeh Group, NBM Headquarters: Jordan Established in: 2014 F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

Tamatem is a platform for international game developers who want to enter the Middle East. It localizes games and makes them culturally relevant to the MENA market. Since 2014, Tamatem has published more than 45 games, with over 50 characters created to date. Founder Hussam Hammo was also the co-founder of Wizards Productions. Tamatem closed a funding round of $5.5 million in 2020, led by Wamda, the Al Faisalyeh Group, and NBM. OCTOBER 2020

Image from Source

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28 Sarwa Founders: Mark Chahwan, Nadine Mezher, Jad Sayegh Online independent financial advisor

Funding: $9.9 million Investors: KIPCO, ADQ, DIFC, 500 Startups, Shorooq Partners, Hambro Perks, MEVP, Vision Ventures, SANED Equity Partners, Hala Ventures, WAIN Dubai, Phoenician Funds, VSQ Capital Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2017

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

Sarwa is a fully-digitized financial advisory platform. The firm was founded in 2017 after being accepted into the Fintech Hive at DIFC and has since registered over 10,000 users as of January 2020. Earlier this year, the startup secured $8.4 million in funding from investors including KIPCO and 500 Falcons by 500 Startups in California, bringing its total funding since its launch to $9.9 million. The company’s investment committee is composed of experts with experience from Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.

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29 Liwwa Founder: Ahmed Moor

Funding: $9 million Investors: FMO, SAT Capital, 500 Startups, Chris Larsen, Edgo VC, EFG-EV, Wamda, Bank al Etihad, DASH Ventures, Silicon Badia, MVI Headquarters: Jordan Established in: 2015 Liwwa offers financing to SMEs based in Jordan and Egypt. According to the company, it has underwritten more than $45 million in loans to over 1,000 businesses, and it also owns and operates a loan marketplace that allows qualifying lenders to buy SME debt. It has raised $9 million in funding in total so far, with $6 million of that raised in 2020 alone.

29 Seez Founders: Andrew and Tarek Kabrit Smart search engine for online car listings

Funding: $9 million Investors: Wamda Capital, B&Y Venture Partners, Phoenician Funds, Crealize, Angel Investors Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2016 The Seez app provides a search engine for online car listings using AI and machine learning technologies. The app has recorded 1.6 million downloads, with almost 500,000 cars listed on its platform. It has expanded to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, South Africa, and Pakistan. CEO Tarek Kabrit was previously director of strategy and business development at Yahsat, the aerospace arm of Mubadala. COO Andrew Kabrit says he launched his first company aged 15 in Denmark. In February 2020, the tech startup announced its Series A funding round of $6 million.Â

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Platform connecting investors and small businesses for financing

P RO M OT I O N

A Sparkling Legacy Shahpour Jahan, CEO of Jahan Geneve, discusses what makes the brand unique and how recent developments have had an impact.

The DNA that sustained our legacy is nurturing a profound passion for our craft within our family. My siblings and I inherited our father’s dedication to creating magnificent jewellery and now we teach the new generation the same principles we learned. Our House is unique in that clients entering our store can immediately benefit from our distinctive passion and expertise, cultivated over seven generations. Also, my family’s commitment to providing the most distinguished service and exquisite jewellery creates an altogether exceptional experience aimed at fulfilling our clients’ dreams.

Switzerland seems to be your choice of destination for all manufacturing. Is there a reason why you have not chosen London or Riyadh?

Switzerland has been our home for over 50 years because of its unique culture, which combines a strong work ethic with unparalleled attention to detail.

It’s therefore no surprise to us that Switzerland is the birthplace and home to world-class companies spanning several industries. Also, Geneva has a proud tradition and famous history of extraordinary craftsmanship.

What is the Kimberly process you follow and what role has it played in your business?

The Kimberley Process is a UN-sponsored initiative that started in the early 2000s to ensure that the diamond trade does

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You are the 7th generation in the business. What has sustained your legacy for so long?

not foment nor finance conflict in any of the countries where diamonds originate.

Our company celebrates this process since it aligns our industry to the high ethical standards we have always set for ourselves. These measures reassure clients that our jewellery is not only beautiful but also promotes positive developments in the countries where our remarkable gemstones originate.

We look forward to supporting similar initiatives that help make our trade even more transparent.

What measures did you take as an organization to ensure continuous production and timely deliveries throughout the pandemic?

To ensure continuous production and timely deliveries, we remained connected with our clients via FaceTime and WhatsApp, sharing new designs and our progress when crafting their wonderful jewels. We then leveraged our close relationships with the world’s leading transporters and logistics experts to deliver our creations around the world. This meant our clients enjoyed the excellent service we always offered

without any disruption. We now offer video appointments to share new collections with our clients and sustain their desire for our jewels.

What impact has your new website had?

We wanted to offer our clients the most luxurious online experience possible now that they cannot visit our stores as regularly. Our clients still want to celebrate important events like anniversaries and birthdays, and usually they would visit our stores to choose or begin designing beautiful gifts. Our new site allows visitors to discover over 160 creations more easily than ever before and connect with us using our “live chat” and WhatsApp integrations.

We experienced a larger than expected increase in traffic after the launch as well as a significant rise in sales as a direct result of our website.

www.jahan.ch

The thoughts expressed in this advertorial are those of the client. Forbes Middle East does not endorse any claims made or opinions expressed in this paid program.

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29 tabby

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Founders: Hosam Arab, Daniil Barkalov Buy now, pay later platform

Funding: $9 million Investors: Global founders capital, Arbor Ventures, Wamda capital, Raed Ventures, MSA Capital Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2019

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

tabby offers a buy now, pay later solution in the U.A.E. Co-founder Hosam Arab previously co-founded fashion e-commerce platform Namshi, which was then fully acquired by Emaar Malls. tabby offers customers of retailers in the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia flexible payment options, including a single deferred payment or multiple installments. The company has raised $9 million in total funding, with $7 million raised in 2020 alone.

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32 360VUZ Founder: Khaled Zaatarah

Funding: $8.75 million Investors: Shorooq Partners, KBW Ventures, Media Visions, Vision Ventures, Hala Ventures, 500Startups, Magnus Olsson, Samih Toukan, Jonathan Labin, Al Touq Group, DTEC Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Al Rashid family angel investors, Tareq Jalabi, and Mohanad Alwadiya.

Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2017 360VUZ is one of the most popular immersive virtual video mobile apps in the region, with views surpassing 20 million per month in more than 15 countries in 2020. The app has been ranked as one of the top featured apps on the Apple App Store.

With offices in Dubai and Los Angeles, the company has partnered with global brands such as Snapchat, Universal Studios, NBA, and the Oscars. It raised $5.8 million in funding in 2020, and has plans to further expand in Asia and Europe.

33 Toters Founders: Nael Halwani, Tamim Khalfa On-demand delivery tech platform

Funding: $8.4 million Investors: B&Y, Phoenician Funds, MEVP, Private Investors Headquarters: Lebanon

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Established in: 2017 Toters connects customers with retailers and local couriers to deliver goods from any grocery store, restaurant, or other retail shops in Lebanon and Iraq.

It currently has more than 100 employees and has operations across 10 cities in Lebanon and Iraq, with around 1,000 partners. The startup has secured $8.4 million in multiple rounds led by B&Y, Phoenician Funds, MEVP and private investors. F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

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Immersive video mobile application

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34 ServiceMarket Founders: Bana Shomali, Wim Torfs Online marketplace for moving, home services, and insurance

Funding: $8 million Investors: AddVenture and Emaar Industries and Investments Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2013 ServiceMarket, previously launched in 2013 as MoveSouq, provides quotes and online bookings for moving, home services, and insurance through a network of more than 200 partners. The company offers home services in the U.A.E, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. In 2018, ServiceMarket secured $4 million in a Series B funding round, which it used to expand its offering in cleaning, car insurance, painting, maintenance and babysitting services. Co-founders Bana Shomali and Wim Torfs were both previously Mckinsey & Company consultants.

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MadfooatCom Founder: Nasser Saleh Online, real-time bill presentment and payment system

Funding: $7.8 million Investors: Etihad Bank, Capital Bank, Cairo Amman Bank, APIC Headquarters: Jordan Image from Source, MadfooatCom Photo by Raja for Forbes Middle East

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Established in: 2013 MadfooatCom connects banks with billers to facilitate bill payments and inquiries through electronic channels on a 24/7 basis. In 2014, MadfooatCom established eFAWATEERcom in partnership with the Central Bank of Jordan. eFAWATEERcom is integrated with 92% of banks in Jordan, allowing customers to use banks’ electronic channels to pay over 250 types of bills electronically. It has processed over 18 million invoices, valued at $15 billion.

Founder Nasser Saleh was previously the CIO of Jordan’s second fiscal reform program.

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36 Foodics Founders: Mosab Alothmani, Ahmad Alzaini All-in-one restaurant management system

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Funding: $7.7 million

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Investors: Al Riyadh Investment, Naseel Holding, Raed Advanced Investments, Derayah, Elm, Taqnia, 500 Startups Headquarters: Saudi Arabia Established in: 2016 Foodics is a cloud-based all-in-one restaurant management system for F&B outlets in MENA. Co-founders Ahmad Alzaini and Mosab Alothmani met while they were college classmates at King Fahd University in Saudi Arabia. Today, Foodics has over 10,000 customers and has processed over a billion orders, with five offices across Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Egypt. The company raised $2.2 million in funding in 2020 from venture capital firms Derayah and Elm. It is currently closing a Series B round, according to the CEO.

37 Dokkan

Afkar

Founders: Abdullah Bajri, Mohamad Nasrallah, Ammar Waganah Homegrown gadgets, gizmos and gifts e-commerce platform

Funding: $7.6 million Investors: BIAC, Venture Souq, Riyad Taqnia Fund, SVC Headquarters: Saudi Arabia Established in: 2013

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Dokkan Afkar is an online shopping website for gizmos and gadgets, with operations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Bahrain and Oman. Products range from home gadgets to unique technology items to creative fashion items.

The company raised $5.6 million in late 2019, which it plans to use to increase its homegrown product inventory and to expand its customer base throughout the Middle East. Co-founder Abdullah Bajri also founded Mahabaa, an online giftdelivery service, in 2017.

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37 LoadMe Founders: Sebastian Morar, Claudia Pacurar, Sebastian Stefan Online marketplace for transporters

Funding: $7.6 million Investors: DP World, PVP, DGI, Angel Investors Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2016 LoadMe is a transport management system on a cloud-based platform that connects cargo owners with available trucks in real time across the GCC, Levant countries and North Africa, and provides local and cross-border trucking services. Companies like Unilever, P&G and Kuhne+Nagel are among its clients. LoadME has secured $7.6 million in total funding, with $6.3 million raised in 2020 alone.

39 Medicus AI Founders: Baher Al Hakim, Nadine Nehme, Makram Saleh AI-based platform interpreting medical data

Funding: $7.4 million Investors: Biopart Investment, Die Brükenköpfe, Audalion (Algorithm), NEOI Headquarters: U.A.E., Austria Established in: 2016 Medicus AI is an AI-based platform that is used by diagnostic labs and health insurance companies to provide patient-friendly health reports, as well as continuous and personalized wellbeing coaching. The company currently has operations in Vienna, Dubai, Paris, and Beirut.

40 Eat App Founders: David Feuillard, Nezar Kadhem Online restaurant reservation platform

Funding: $7.2 million Investors: 500 Startups, MEVP, Tenmou Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2015 Eat App is a reservation platform for diners looking for restaurants. According to the founders the app has seated more than 10 million diners across 2,400 restaurants across the Middle East. Eat App has raised $7.2 million in total funding so far, with $5 million of that raised in 2020 alone.

It aims to reach 5,000 restaurants this year.

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41 Sary Founders: Mohammed Aldossary, Khaled Alsiari Digital B2B marketplace

Funding: $7 million Investors: Raed VC, MSA Capital, Derayah, Angel Investors Headquarters: Saudi Arabia Established in: 2018

Sary connects small businesses such as mini-supermarkets, restaurants, cafes, and hotels, with suppliers, in order to facilitate inventory procurement. The marketplace has more than 11,000 users currently and recorded 20,000 shipments with a gross merchandise value of $20.8 million in 2019, according to the company. Sary has raised $6.98 million in total funding, with $6.6 million secured in 2020 alone.

42 Cura Founders: Wael A. Kabli, Mohammad G. Zekrallah Telehealth platform

Funding: $6 million Investors: Enma for Business, undisclosed investor Headquarters: Saudi Arabia Established in: 2016

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Cura is a telehealth platform that enables patients to receive consultations, diagnoses, prescriptions, and well-being therapy sessions through instant messaging and live video calls from their mobile phones. There is also a feedback mechanism so patients can rate the doctors and give feedback on the service. The company has more than 2,400 registered doctors and more than 500,000 users, operating from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. They have conducted over 285,000 telemedicine consultations to date.

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42 RIZEK Founder: Abdallah Abu Sheikh 48

On-demand services

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Funding: $6 million Investors: ADQ, ADIO, Etech, other investors Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2019

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

RIZEK is an online service provider that covers six main sectors: beauty and wellness, maintenance, business and design, healthcare, education, and automotive. Since launching last year, the company has secured $6 million in funding, and signed an MoU for cloud-computing services with Alibaba Cloud. Founder Abdallah Abu Sheikh has previously published a book of poetry.

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44 Ajar Founder: Shaheen Alkhudhari Cloud-based property management and rent collection platform

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Funding: $5.9 million

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Investors: BECO Capital, Sharq VC, Seed Partner, 500 Startups, SBX Capital Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2016 Ajar offers its clients a property management solution, with rent collection capabilities for landlords in the U.A.E. and Kuwait, as well as Spain and Bosnia. Ajar’s business model is primarily based on transaction fees from payments made via credit and debit cards. According to the company, it performed 82,000 transactions last year, with a gross merchandise value of $110 million.

45 Carzaty Founders: Marwan Chaar, Hassan Jaffar Online marketplace for assured cars

Funding: $5.6 million Investors: IDO, Sansar Capital, Family Offices Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2017

Images from Source

Carzaty is an online platform to search for, compare, buy and finance new and used cars. The company was founded in 2017 in Muscat, Oman, and expanded to the U.A.E. in August 2019, where it opened its second retail shop at Dubai World Trade Centre.

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45 Justmop Founders: Kerem Kuyucu, Ali Cagatay Ozcan Online on-demand home cleaning services

Funding: $5.6 million Investors: Bertan Yeniceri, OAK Capital, VF, Collective Spark, Faith Capital, 500 Startups Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2015 Justmop connects people with professional cleaners and cleaning service providers. It currently operates in the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. Its business model is commission-based so it takes a percentage from every completed order. Co-founders Kerem Kuyucu and Ali Cagatay Ozcan previously worked at Rocket Internet Turkey and Foodonclick.com.

47 MYKI Founders: Priscilla Elora Sharuk, Antoine Vincent Jebara Password management solution

Funding: $5.2 million Investors: BECO Capital, LEAP Ventures, B&Y Venture Partners Headquarters: Lebanon Established in: 2015 MYKI is a password management and authentication company that today has 40 employees and serves more than 700,000 customers across 172 countries. Global companies such as Barracuda, ConnectWise, and CB Insights are among its clients. The company is currently in the midst of another funding round, according to the co-founders.

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48 Crowd Analyzer Founders: Ahmed Saad, Bahaa Galal Consumer intelligence, social media monitoring, and activation platform

Funding: $5 million Investors: Wamda capital, Raed ventures, Faith Capital, Arzan Venture Capital, TechInvest, Angel investors

Crowd Analyzer enables marketers in MENA to monitor, analyze and activate crowds, helping them make marketing and business decisions based on AI and machine learning.

In early 2020, the company announced its acquisition of Task Spotting, a peer-to-peer marketing platform that helps brands drive digital word of mouth on social media.

Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2016

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48 Mawaad

Environmental Services Founder: Ismail Fahmy Materials processing and resource recovery company

Funding: $5 million Investors: Ahmed Sadek El Sewedy, Emanat LTD Headquarters: U.A.E. Established in: 2018

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

Mawaad Environmental Services is a materials processing and resource recovery company backed by Elsewedy Industries’ COO and board member of Elsewedy Electric, Ahmed Sadek El Sewedy. The company uses metal recovery technology to cut costs in heavy industries. It counts Emirates Steel and Ezz Steel as clients and operates across the GCC and Egypt.Â

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Photo by Ihab Mohamed (www.eghstudio.com) for Forbes Middle East

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48 MoneyFellows Founder: Ahmed Wadi Digitized ROSCA system

Funding: $5 million Investors: 500 startups, Partech Ventures, Sawari Ventures, Dubai Angel Investors Headquarters: Egypt Established in: 2016

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MoneyFellows is a digitized Rotating Credit and Savings Association (ROSCA) system, which offers users a mobile and web-based ROSCA that is more convenient, manageable, scalable and secure than the traditional offline model. MoneyFellows aims to build a group lending and saving model among a community of trusted peers around the world. It has raised $5.05 million in total funding, with $4 million secured in 2020 alone.Â

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SERVING THE UNDERSERVED

EGYPT’S HALAN IS POISED TO BECOME THE REGION’S NEXT SUPER-APP. BUT CO-FOUNDERS, AHMED MOHSEN, MOUNIR NAKHLA, AND MOHAMED ABOULNAGA HAVE MORE THAN MONEY IN SIGHT—THEY WANT TO EMPOWER THE MASSES.

BY CLAUDINE COLETTI

Photo by Ihab Mohamed (www.eghstudio.com) for Forbes Middle East

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Along the dusty, noisy, and packed roads of Egypt’s densely-populated cities, motorbikes are a common sight, weaving in and out of the bustling traffic amongst the blaring horns and car fumes. In a country with more than 100 million people, roads can be a challenge to navigate at the best of times, and for many residents the cost of car ownership is prohibitive, making getting around even tougher for a large portion of the population. However, thanks to technology, the country’s underserved have options.

One such option is Egypt-based ride-hailing app, Halan, which specializes in making motorbikes and tuk-tuks as easy to book as a Careem or Uber car, but at only around 15% of the cost according to the company, making them perfect for passengers living in informal communities and villages. Another option for that market is bus-hailing app Swvl, which enables passengers heading in the same direction to share fixed-route bus trips. Halan and Swvl’s models, however, differ. Swvl has a network of over 600 lines in Cairo and Alexandria, and recently launched in Kenya and Pakistan. Having launched in late-2017, today Halan is available in over 25 cities across Egypt and Sudan—it’s now reportedly eyeing Ethiopia. By September 2020 the Halan app had been download approximately 2.45 million times, and had around 890,000 users.

In that time the startup has also attracted significant investor interest, pulling in more than $23.5 million in investment so far from venture capitalists Battery Road Digital Holdings, Algebra Ventures, MEVP, MNT Investing, UTT, TEXILA and Shaka Capital, as well as Oscar Salazar, the founding CTO of Uber. Halan’s Series B funding round is still ongoing, but so far it’s used its money to branch out in a big way. As well as ridehailing, the app now also offers e-commerce and food F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

“COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst. People are changing how they are doing things.”

Rather than following local competitors, Halan’s latest moves closely follow the model of Gojek, an Indonesian super app and one of the Asian country’s few unicorns. Gojek began as an offline motorbike taxi service in Jakarta in 2009, but after it launched an app in January 2015 it began to grow exponentially. It currently lists 16 different online services, including an e-wallet. In March 2020, it closed a Series F funding round for $1.2 billion—reportedly raking in undisclosed investment from Google and Tencent among others—valuing Gojek at almost $10 billion.

Does Nakhla see the same trajectory for Halan?

“Certainly,” he smiles. “We’re on our way, we’re going to make it very big. We’re lucky to be where we are now. There’s a bit of serendipity in it.”

The growing market for microfinance in Egypt certainly seems to offer plenty of opportunity.

According to an Oxford Business Group report, in 2016 an estimated 18 million people in Egypt were in need of microfinance services, equating to a $3.6 billion financing requirement based on an average loan size of $988. Recognizing demand, the Central Bank of Egypt launched a microfinancing initiative in 2017, and then in late-2019 Egypt’s Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) launched a new microfinance programme, called nano finance, OCTOBER 2020

55 HALAN

delivery options, as well as peer-to-peer delivery and bill payment solutions. But it’s the app’s next evolution that the team are currently most excited about. “We’re really at a time of change,” says Mounir Nakhla, co-founder and CEO of Halan.

In October, the Halan team plans to venture further into microfinance and launch its first lending platform, which will be available—along with all its other services—on one big “super app,” a simple consumerfacing platform focusing on services for underserved markets. Microfinance broadly refers to microcredit, which is the loaning of small sums to people with low income, or other financial services for those without access to conventional banking.

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or transferring money through our app.

That’s where the real value is.”

For Nakhla, Halan’s latest development into microfinance is an area in which he specializes.

He first began working in the field with his family in Egypt, as a fresh graduate from the London School of Economics. “I worked with my uncle, Dr. Mounir Neamatalla. He is an environmentalist, a pioneer in sustainable development, and the first to launch microfinance to alleviate poverty in Egypt,” says Nakhla. In 2003 to 2005, Nakhla recalls travelling around Egypt working on an impact study on microfinance, conducting thousands of interviews and statistical analysis. “The more I worked with microfinance, the more I realized we are touching a lot of lives. You are not lending money for consumption, you are financing micro-entrepreneurs to grow their business, employ people, and generate more income for them and their families,” he explains. “This is an important part of my life and work. It is my mission.”

With a vision to help those in need in a sustainable and ultimately lucrative way, in 2009 Nakhla partnered with GB Auto and founded Mashroey, a light-transport financing business that helps people purchase motorbikes and three-wheelers, followed in 2015 by Tasaheel, one of Egypt’s largest microfinancing companies. He is also the founder and CEO of MNT Investments BV, the Netherlandsbased holding company for both businesses. In August 2018, Development Partners International (DPI) invested $45 million in a 33% stake in MNT Investments, partnering with existing majority shareholder, GB Capital—Nakhla retained his position leading the company. “Investing in a business that provides financial inclusion by giving access to credit for small business owners to grow their businesses is very rewarding on multiple levels,” says Ziad Abaza, Principal at DPI. “Since investing in MNT, we strongly believe that the digitalization is key to scalability.”

Nakhla says talks are ongoing to link up MNT Investments with Halan’s lending platform.

Meanwhile, 2017 had brought with it a fateful encounter. On a business trip to Asia, Nakhla was OCTOBER 2020

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enabling microlenders to begin offering mobile-based loans at a cap of $190 with a maximum tenor of 90 days. This “seeks to provide working capital needs and requirements to small farmers and selfemployed persons, home-based businesses, day-to-day vendors and street vendors,” said the FRA’s Chairman, Dr. Mohammed Omran, in the announcement at the time.

The timing of the Halan super-app launch is no accident for a number of reasons. “COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst. People are changing how they are doing things,” admits Nakhla. But even pre-pandemic, Egypt was already a very tech-driven society.

According to Datareportal’s Digital 2020 report for Egypt, there were 92.7 million mobile connections in Egypt in January 2020, which is equivalent to 91% of the population. But, according to the World Bank’s Little Data Book Of Financial Inclusion 2018 report, more than 67% of Egypt’s adults at that time remained unbanked. It’s this portion of the population— with smartphones in hand but struggling to access finance—that the Halan team plans to target.

Importantly, it won’t be Halan itself lending the money. The app will act as a platform to link the client to a finance lender; it will then be up to the lender to perform due diligence and protect themselves and the borrower. What Halan will be doing though, is collecting data to assist in assessing someone’s creditworthiness based on when and if they repay the small loans, and thereby automating and speeding up the approvals process. The company will also take a cut on every transaction.

As well as diving further into microfinance and fintech, Halan’s super app will also continue to develop its verticals in e-commerce and delivery, and it will stay true to its ride-hailing roots. “Ridehailing is a difficult vertical to turn into positive unit economics, but it keeps the stickiness of the client, it keeps the app top-of-mind,” explains Nakhla. “The client is going every day doing his rides, but then he buys his mobile phone off our app, he tops up his loan on our app, he starts paying his electricity bills

“I think [Nakhla] will do something great for his country.”

The idea for Halan was born, but Nakhla needed an expert in technology. He reached out to someone he calls a “guru” in his field. Ahmed Mohsen, co-founder and CTO at Halan, was a computer science graduate, published thought leader, and former employee of IBM Egypt with some previous experience in founding startups. Having tried his hand at establishing an e-learning company in 2006, he became a founding member of Egyptian cybersecurity company SecureMisr in 2010, which was acquired by Cysiv in March 2020. He remembers being in the middle of starting a new venture when he met Nakhla in 2017. “We really clicked from the first meeting,” says Mohsen. “I had my doubts about the target market being tech savvy, but Mounir reassured me this was not a problem. He was right.”

The team built the first version of Halan as a simple ride-hailing transportation app, inspired by the Gojek model. It was launched in November 2017, seeded with $525,000 from Nakhla, the founder of GB Auto Dr. Raouf Ghabbour, and Halpert through Battery Road Digital Holdings. By the following year, Nakhla says the business was experiencing F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

double-digit growth month-over-month. The CEO decided to expand the executive team, this time with a co-founder focused on increasing value. Mohsen introduced Nakhla to Mohamed Aboulnaga, now co-founder and CCO at Halan, an engineering graduate with previous experience at Careem and electronic payments company Fawry, both of which have since had successful IPOs. Aboulnaga was intrigued. “I thought I couldn’t leave this opportunity, so I jumped on the boat,” he smiles.

In March 2018, Halan added another vertical by offering deliveries for restaurants, including favorites like McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and KFC, followed by pharmaceutical deliveries. That same year the company raised $4.4 million in a Series A funding round led by Battery Road Digital Holdings and Algebra Ventures. “A combination of an exceptional team and large untouched market led to our investment,” says Karim Hussein, Managing Partner at Algebra Ventures. “Halan also has several unique competitive advantages, as the market is difficult to access and requires a strong marketing and technology backbone to serve profitably.”

As the company grew, the founders’ vision began to change, inspired at least partly by Lyft and Uber’s underwhelming IPOs in 2019. “VCs started to talk more about unit economics. So, it wasn’t merely growth that was attracting investors,” explains Nakhla.

In September 2019, Halan began offering e-commerce through Halan Deals. Although this is now one of its fastest-growing segments, it was not a hit straight away. “I think we had crossed a million downloads and we did not get any sales,” Mohsen remembers. They decided to make a small change and began listing the products on credit so people could pay in installments. Suddenly products began selling out in days. Then, in March 2020, the company launched the Halan Wallet to enable users to pay for their rides and utility bills. “When we launched bill payments we reached a different type of customer, higher in the socioeconomic level,” says Aboulnaga.

“We used this to launch more products, like the peerto-peer delivery.”

Now, Halan’s next phase begins. Along with introducing lending, the team is eyeing expansion in Africa, and a revamp of the e-commerce vertical. The long-term goal? To be the preferred consumer app for underserved communities. They have support behind them. “I think [Nakhla] will do something great for his country,” says Halpert. “Arguably he already has, but I think it can get much better.”

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introduced to David Halpert, founder of Battery Road Digital Holdings and Prince Street Capital Holdings, and seed investor in Gojek. “I had heard of [Nakhla’s] reputation previously as a thought leader in microfinance in Africa. He knew of my interest in technology and startups in the developing world,” remembers Halpert. “We already had a few friends in common, but as soon as I met him I knew this was someone I wanted to try to work with.”

Halpert advised Nakhla that, although his projects up to that point had been successful, the fact that they were not technology-driven was restricting the value they could create. “I’m very grateful for the conversation we had. It changed my perspective on the world, and by consequence the strategy of the business,” says Nakhla. “Technology is how I can take this mission and scale it very rapidly.”

• 50 MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS •

BOOKED UP

FODHIL BENTURQUIA’S DUBAI-BASED DOCTOR APPOINTMENT BOOKING PLATFORM OKADOC IS FORAYING INTO TELEMEDICINE AS THE LOCAL HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY EMBRACES NEW TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS.

BY SAMUEL WENDEL

Photo by Garage Studio for Forbes Middle East

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Of the many changes brought by COVID19, the growth of telemedicine has arguably been one of the most vital. While those on the frontline have relied on technology to monitor the virus, lockdowns during the pandemic increased the need for routine care to be delivered remotely—and industry players and countries rushed to respond.

In the Middle East, things quickly became virtual. In April, one Dubai-based startup, Okadoc—an up and coming online doctor appointment booking platform—launched its new telemedicine service for patients in the U.A.E. months earlier than planned, offering access to video consultation, online chats and document exchanges. It was a move directly influenced by COVID-19. “From what we see, video consultation is definitely happening, it’s growing,” says Fodhil Benturquia, Okadoc’s CEO. “There are more and more doctors and healthcare providers who want it.”

For Benturquia—who founded Okadoc in 2018 after leaving his role as Group CEO of online retailer Noon—the launch of telemedicine came ahead of schedule.

But he was ready to take action, thanks to Okadoc’s $10 million Series A round closed in February 2020, from backers including Abu Dhabi Investment Office and Ithmar Capital Partners. It was a notable round for a regional health-tech startup.

Some of those funds were already intended to help Okadoc introduce telemedicine, which

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would enable doctors to offer follow-up appointments, pre-consultations and second opinions through video consultation. But that move wasn’t planned until the second half of 2020. As COVID-19 emerged, the startup only had a basic version of the service ready.

It was obvious Okadoc needed to alter its plans, says Benturquia. It sped up development and got regulatory approval, managing to launch teleconsultations about a month after lockdowns started. That gave patients access to more than 400 doctors, a network underpinned by 38 healthcare providers, including Emirates Hospitals & Clinics, HealthPlus Network of Specialty Centers, and Moorfields Eye Hospital Abu Dhabi, among others.

Previously, Benturquia expected it would take five to ten years for telemedicine to go mainstream. “I think we’ve just gained two to three years in terms of adoption, from both healthcare providers as well as patients,” he says. One partner, Medcare, recently conducted a review of the telemedicine solution to gauge progress after several months of use. “It was really heartwarming to see the exponential growth in patient utilization, in accessing their service needs,” says Andre Daoud, Group CEO at Medcare Hospitals & Medical Centres. “Finding the right partner, in this case Okadoc, that shares the same passion in delivering smart and user-friendly solutions, is instrumental for the success of such initiatives.”

Ultimately, the move from Okadoc adds a new dimension to its online appointment booking platform, and provides a glimpse of Benturquia’s ambitions for his company in a competitive health-tech space. “We really wanted to become an enabler rather than a disrupter,” says Benturquia. “What we’ve done is really worked on building solutions for our healthcare providers, for our patients.”

The shift to telehealth was inevitable, says Mohamed Berrada, partner and healthcare practice leader at consulting firm Kearney in Dubai. “Telemedicine has been developing for several years, with many startups and

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corporations driving innovative solutions,” says Berrada. But COVID-19 forced industry stakeholders to align quickly around virtual care, from providers and insurers to regulators.

Governments moved fast too, such as the U.A.E.’s health ministry launching virtual clinics to ensure the continuation of services. Now comes the task of solidifying that progress, due to the benefits that telemedicine provides for healthcare systems. “It will make it more efficient in how we deliver care, but also curb the cost of healthcare, which is what everyone is trying to do,” says Berrada.

“We’re really trying to kind of build this ecosystem around the appointment and video consultation.”

Okadoc can be seen as a local counterpart to players like Zocdoc in the U.S. and Doctolib in France. Broadly speaking, these companies connect patients to doctors online, allowing them to book appointments in a few clicks. That means no more calling to arrange an appointment, while also offering potential operational efficiency boosts for healthcare providers.

As of early 2020, patients in the U.A.E. could access 1,000 doctors from 70 specialties through Okadoc’s app and website, which are integrated with international and local hospital information systems and free for patients to use. The startup has a strategic partnership with Dubai Healthcare City, and works with a growing number of local healthcare providers. Benturquia reports an uptick in new clients during the pandemic, as more providers come around to digital tools, but he doesn’t share numbers.

In the region, Okadoc faces plenty of established competition. In Dubai that includes Meddy, founded in 2015, and Vezeeta, which originally launched in Egypt in 2012 and notably pulled in a $40 million series D round this year. Both of these players recently launched telemedicine services too, upping the competitive stakes.

Last year, Okadoc set a goal to penetrate 35% of the U.A.E. by 2021—a milestone Benturquia thinks the company will now reach sooner. Meanwhile, its recent funding was also intended to support F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

expansion into Saudi Arabia. Alongside the U.A.E., the company has operated in Indonesia since 2018; that’s where most of Okadoc’s technology development occurs.

Benturquia also reports that Okadoc is working closely with insurance companies at the moment on a development that will be announced soon.

He doesn’t get into specifics, but collaboration with insurers is a natural development. And as its telemedicine service shows, the company has a platform it can build around. “We’re really trying to kind of build this ecosystem around the appointment and video consultation,” says Benturquia.

At first glance, Benturquia is an unlikely healthcare entrepreneur. His resume reads like a history of online shopping in the region, including stints with e-commerce retailers Souq, MarkaVIP and Noon.

He got his start in investment banking with Société Générale in 2007, after studying banking and financial management in France. However, there was pressure from his family to explore entrepreneurship. “I always had this thing where my parents are like, ‘why don’t you work for yourself?’” he says.

In 2010, he co-founded Jordanian e-commerce portal MarkaVIP, serving as head of business development. Within a year he joined Souq in the U.A.E., just as e-commerce was gaining early momentum regionally—he still remembers riding the lift in his building one day and spotting a neighbor holding a Souq package, which he designed. He spent nearly five years with the company, eventually overseeing its Saudi operations before later joining Noon.

Working in e-commerce, he grew accustomed to the convenience provided by technology platforms.

“You book your taxi or your Uber or Careem in a couple of seconds, you buy your food online,” says Benturquia. And then one day he got sick.

He found booking an appointment with a doctor was much harder than hailing a ride. Instead he got stuck on the phone. “It took me 15 minutes not to get an appointment,” says Benturquia. He felt digital technology would make this process simpler. He discussed the subject with friends and his doctor. It was a big leap, but with his technical knowledge and product development experience, he felt he could transition to healthcare.

Okadoc was self-funded by the team initially.

People worked without salaries as they developed OCTOBER 2020

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allowing patients to change appointments on their terms. As a result, Benturquia says his company has helped reduce no-shows by 75%.

The startup also provides white label solutions, where clients embed Okadoc’s booking tools into their own branded websites or mobile apps. That offers new options for patients booking directly through a healthcare provider’s website.

Benturquia sees that as another differentiator.

Yet, developing the platform wasn’t a quick process, including learning moments as Benturquia adapted to the healthcare space. Coming from e-commerce, he was used to relying on digital marketing. Here, Okadoc’s team felt it could optimize customer acquisition, spread awareness and grow transactions online. That ended up being harder than expected—patients weren’t necessarily willing to switch doctors, so digital marketing wasn’t that effective. “This was a great lesson,” says Benturquia.

The startup secured proper seed funding in 2018, a $2.3 million round mostly from angel investors familiar with the online booking concept. Some backers included local clinic owners, a connection giving Okadoc an opportunity to develop and test its products.

Eventually, the startup eyed telemedicine. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic there was local interest in new solutions in digital health, but not all industry players were convinced. Something Benturquia says has completely changed now.

COVID-19’s arrival led to a couple of busy months for Okadoc, with the team working around the clock.

The startup was trying to launch a new service while on-boarding hundreds of new doctors and working completely from home. “We had to really reinvent ourselves,” says Benturquia.

Prior to the pandemic, healthcare providers used digital tools mainly for internal operations, not for engaging with patients, according to Benturquia.

But the pandemic is changing that dynamic, a shift that should shape healthcare in the years ahead.

So far Okadoc is making the moves to capture that opportunity.

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a proof of concept and learned from doctors and patients. They wanted to replicate the experience of buying airfare online.

“You book your ticket, you know your seat, you’re going to the airport,” says Benturquia.

That meant creating a real-time connectivity between Okadoc and healthcare providers by integrating with hospital information systems. And unlike calling to book, Okadoc’s platform is designed to be used 24/7. “If you cancel, if you reschedule, it’s really instant,” says Benturquia. The startup also worked to localize its service, catering to the diversity in local populations.

“It’s very important for a patient to book an appointment with a doctor who comes from the same country or speaks the same mother tongue,” says Benturquia.

At the beginning, the platform focused mainly on patients—that’s the perspective he viewed the problem from. But soon he realized healthcare providers didn’t necessarily share Okadoc’s priorities.

“They saw it as a problem but they were facing much bigger problems that were impacting their bottom lines,” says Benturquia. Getting healthcare players onboard meant solving their problems too.

He found one. Feedback revealed that no-shows were causing headaches for doctors. Okadoc studied the problem, finding the average appointment no-show rate in the U.A.E. was 37%. In Saudi Arabia it was over 40%. They compared that to the U.S., where the rate was half that. “We were like, ‘ok, now we understand why they’re talking about no-shows,’” says Benturquia.

Some healthcare providers worried that online bookings might actually make that problem worse.

Local doctors had their theories about no-shows, but data was scarce. Okadoc surveyed patients, finding that 40% of missed appointments happened because people wanted to cancel or reschedule but couldn’t.

This was new information for healthcare providers, according to Benturquia.

Okadoc developed methods to limit no-shows, including different kinds of reminders, such as SMS and push notifications at different intervals. But the platform’s 24/7 availability was a crucial feature here,

• 50 MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS •

ON THE GO

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WITH THEIR STARTUP, IKCON, CLOUD KITCHEN ENTREPRENEURS KHALID BAAREH AND KAREEM ABUGHAZALEH ARE VYING FOR A SLICE OF A FAST-GROWING SPACE IN DUBAI AND BEYOND.

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n recent years, appetites for on-demand food delivery services like Deliveroo, Talabat, or Uber Eats, have boomed in the Middle East, transforming the way hungry consumers satisfy their cravings for everything from sushi to shawarma—but as demand grows, food brands that don’t have restaurants in multiple locations have found themselves struggling to keep up. The result: many of the meals you order online are not coming from a restaurant at all, they are being prepared in a cloud kitchen.

Broadly speaking, cloud kitchens operate shared commercial kitchens where restaurant brands prepare food for delivery through online booking platforms. They go by many names, including “ghost” or “satellite” kitchens, but they’re all part of a space that’s growing globally, popularized in part

by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, who now runs the company, CloudKitchens.

One rising player in the Middle East is iKcon, which currently operates 12 kitchens in the U.A.E. Short for Innovative Kitchen Concepts, it was founded in 2019 by Khalid Baareh and Kareem Abughazaleh. “We noticed a shift of revenue from analog to digital and the growing demand for food delivery in the region,” says Baareh, CEO. iKcon is among a slew of companies vying for a slice of this market. In the U.A.E. alone that includes players like OneKitchen, Food to Go, and Sweetheart Kitchen, among others. Even Deliveroo operates shared kitchens in the U.A.E. But the big homegrown player is Kitopi, which has global ambitions and is dual-headquartered in Dubai and New York.

Investors appear to have a hearty appetite for what these companies are cooking up. Take Kitopi— it raised a $60 million Series B funding round in February 2020, intended to help fund expansion in the U.S. and beyond. Meanwhile, in July 2020 iKcon raised a $5 million pre-Series A round, led by Arzan VC, AlTouq Group, and Nazer Group. That’s setting the table for iKcon to become a key player in the region too. “Looking at iKcon’s numbers, or also comparing it with Kitopi’s numbers, you see that this is a big market,” says Hasan Zainal, managing partner at Arzan VC. The startup has now raised $10 million in less than two years of existence. With those funds, iKcon is expanding its footprint in the U.A.E. and beyond. It opened a new facility in Abu Dhabi in September 2020, with more planned for the U.A.E. this year, including one in Sharjah. The goal is to grow its network to 30 kitchens by the end of 2021.

But the big move on the horizon is a launch in Saudi Arabia, planned for the end of this year. There it can tap into a growing market opportunity (one Kitopi is targeting too). Revenue from online food delivery in Saudi Arabia is projected to reach $1.6 billion this year, eventually rising to $2.3 billion by 2024, according to market researcher Statista.

To date, iKcon’s facilities are used by more than 40 brand partners, with examples including Lord of the Wings, Clinton St. Baking, Jet Set Burger, Yalla Shawarma and more. For comparison, Kitopi, which was founded in 2018, works with more than 120 restaurant partners.

BY SAMUEL WENDEL

iKcon, cloud kitchen entrepreneurs Khalid Baareh and Kareem Abughazaleh.

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“If you’re opening in a cloud kitchen it’s all about the reach,” says Jason Bassili, managing director for Salmontini, which operates restaurants and a smoked salmon factory in Dubai. He launched Salmontini Sushi Bar with iKcon in June 2020, a casual dining concept he felt paired well with the cloud kitchen model.

Through iKcon, brands like his can extend their delivery footprint into new areas, but without the hassle traditionally associated with expansion. It cuts down on the time and effort required to physically expand into new areas, while outsourcing preparation of delivery meals. “Going to open your own brick and mortar is not a safe investment anymore,” says Baareh. With iKcon, brands can launch in less than a month, while maintaining similar margins.

“We’ve moved faster in the last six months than we did all of last year.”

The food sourcing and production is done by iKcon on behalf of partners, similar to a franchise model. “We have our own supply chain team that sources everything,” says Abughazaleh, who is COO. “We have that built in flexibility within our model to accommodate restaurants and brand owners we work with, in the sense that they may be very specific about an ingredient or a supplier.” Salmontini’s Bassili also cites that flexibility as a selling point, which allows him to keep his chefs involved onsite in the cloud kitchen—a reason he chose iKcon over competitors.

Another advantage is technology. iKcon uses data to match brands to consumer behavior and demand in different areas, while providing tips on marketing techniques and analyzing performance on food aggregator apps. It uses data across its operations, from supply chain to kitchen operations. “That’s the differentiator in the future,” says Arzan’s Zainal.

Still, the cloud kitchen concept is new and may not appeal to everyone in the restaurant world.

However, it appears the COVID-19 pandemic is having an impact here. iKcon was enjoying significant growth rates coming into 2020, says Abughazaleh, but the pandemic shifted the landscape. Initially, the lockdown was a blow, as people limited contact and cooked at home. But eventually demand for delivery returned, while many hurting restaurants pivoted to embrace delivery.

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Against that backdrop, iKcon’s growth has accelerated, says Abughazaleh. “We’ve moved faster in the last six months than we did all of last year,” he says. There are hundreds of restaurants in the pipeline, in various stages of going live. “They started believing in the business model,” says Baareh. Simultaneously, the company has secured attractive real estate and hired talent that was previously hard to find.

Looking ahead, iKcon’s founders have a full plate.

Already, they’re planning to pursue a series A round, as they look to capitalize on their position in the market. And all this has happened in under two years.

“We were lucky to be in the right space, in the right sector at the right time,” says Baareh. iKcon’s founders met 11 years ago while both were pursuing MBAs at London Business School, where they became friends. Both bring distinct career backgrounds to the business.

Baareh majored in engineering at Texas A&M in the U.S., and started out as a consultant with Accenture in Houston, before moving back to the Middle East in 2006. There he worked in investment banking and private equity, including stints with Kuwait’s Farabi Investment and Saudi Arabia’s Alkhabeer Capital, among others.

Meanwhile, Abughazaleh studied finance at Georgetown in the U.S. From there he got into agriculture and food production by managing transportation operations in North America for the company Del Monte Fresh Produce. He eventually landed in the U.A.E., dabbling in different jobs and making angel investments. In 2014, he started Foodie Brands, a catering and food production company. “I wanted to invest in myself,” says Abughazaleh.

Baareh was also tracking the food and beverage space and later joined Foodie Brands as a partner and board member in 2018. By then both were witnessing how digital technology was influencing the restaurant business, and realized cloud kitchens could be the next big thing. “We looked at each other and said, ‘this is for us,’” says Baareh.

Together, they spent six months planning for iKcon, before launching in early 2019. “This needs fundraising, it needs operational background, it needs technology,” says Baareh. They self-funded the company initially, along with support from a couple of friends. iKcon started out with six employees, one kitchen and one brand partner. Within three months came another kitchen and three more brand partners.

As they developed a proof of concept, the founders weren’t too picky about which restaurants they worked with.

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He ticks off examples: customers downtown have a taste for healthier eating—like Keto salads—and tend to spend more money.

Meanwhile, expats in Motor City like Mediterranean cuisines and avoid fast food.

But over around Dubai Marina there’s demand for more affordable eats.

Looking ahead, developing its technology platform will continue to be a focus.

“It’s time to start building on that infrastructure and be creative when it comes to machine learning, AI, predictability and business intelligence,” says Baareh.

To that end, iKcon is currently developing proprietary technology and plans to explore using robotic features in kitchens.

Ultimately, the development of iKcon took a notable turn with the arrival of COVID-19. “This lockdown created new paradigms in how we view our business,” says Abughazaleh. “Everything from hygiene and safety to supply chain, team ability, forward logistics, every aspect needed to be reviewed and adapted under really rapid-fire deadlines.” That led to a lot of sleepless nights for the senior team.

But Abughazaleh believes the company has emerged from this challenging period with a stronger organizational foundation. “It’s become sort of a case study for us in stakeholder management,” says Abughazaleh.

The lasting effects of the pandemic on the food and beverage space remain to be seen, but consumer behavior was already evolving. Thanks to a proliferation of choices, the convenience of ordering and the speed of service, consumers now expect on-demand purchases to be handled and delivered almost flawlessly, says Abughazaleh. Meeting those changing expectations is a continuous process. “This has created a virtual cycle of ongoing service and choice improvements, and it’s all to the benefit of the end consumer,” he says.

Ultimately, people will continue to dine out in the Middle East once COVID-19 fades—but companies like iKcon are helping usher in a new era in food delivery in the region. “One thing is super clear,” says Abughazaleh. “Consumer behavior has changed towards digital and is never coming back.”

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Soon the startup needed more funds, leading to a seed round in the summer of 2019. Arzan VC, which invests in early stage tech companies, backed iKcon here too. A selling point for Zainal was the team. “For the company to continue you need to be able to fund things,” he says. “I believe these guys have the ability to continue fundraising and the ability to convince investors to jump onboard.”

Baareh points to the seed round as a turning point.

It helped iKcon grow and attract stronger brands.

As the startup matured, the screening process for partners became more rigid, with iKcon scrutinizing a brand’s marketing presence and ratings on food delivery aggregators. Unlike some cloud kitchens, iKcon doesn’t develop its own brands, instead partnering with recognized players. “We bring that kind of brand history to the table,” says Salmontini’s Bassili. “It’s not one of these cloud brands that you make in five minutes.”

Partnering with brands requires time, effort and investment from iKcon to make sure restaurants go live successfully. The company expects the same effort in return in areas like marketing. “We want to see commitment from their end about how serious they are,” says Baareh.

Meanwhile, the company worked to build the technology platform to underpin its business. That played out in two main areas. The first was kitchen operations and optimization—including using the Internet of Things, heat maps, conveyor belts, anything that helps reduce prep time and gets orders out faster while maintaining quality.

The second is centered on data analytics, with iKcon tracking demand predictability and consumer behaviors to deliver business intelligence. “That predictability helps us to select the right brand and right cuisine, in the right zone,” says Baareh. Based on data analytics, the startup sees three attractive markets in Dubai, in terms of ticket size, demand and frequency of orders. Those include the areas around Dubai Marina, downtown, and Motor City. “The three areas vary, in the offering, what they like,” says Baareh.

• 50 MOST-FUNDED STARTUPS •

JUSTCLEAN

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CLEANING UP KUWAIT’S JUSTCLEAN IS IRONING OUT PROBLEMS IN THE MIDDLE EAST’S LAUNDRY BUSINESS, USING TECHNOLOGY TO HELP BRING YET ANOTHER OFFLINE INDUSTRY INTO THE DIGITAL AGE.

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mid swelling demand for delivery services during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new on-demand courier service popped up in June 2020 in several GCC countries.

Called JustDeliver, it’s an app allowing customers to dispatch a driver to pick up items, such as groceries.

JustDeliver wasn’t a groundbreaking development—tech-enabled courier services have been around for years in the Middle East— but this wasn’t just another logistics startup. It was created by Kuwait’s JustClean, an online laundry services platform that has quickly built a footprint across the GCC. The company is primarily known for its laundry app, which allows users to schedule for their dirty clothes to be picked up, washed and returned the same day. But as the new courier service demonstrates, the company is evolving.

Founded in 2016 in Kuwait by brothers Athbi Al Enezi and Nouri Al Enezi, JustClean began as a simple online marketplace connecting people to local laundries in Kuwait City. But today the company has spread to five GCC countries while diversifying into different areas, such as software solutions and car cleaning.

JustClean isn’t the only online laundry services company in the GCC. There’s also Washmen, WashPlus, CleanLine, Laundryheap and others.

But JustClean is developing a notable regional presence. “We’ve got over 200,000 users on

our JustClean platform across the GCC and growing,” says Athbi.

It helps that the company is backed by an influential tech player in the region— Mohammad Jaffar, the former CEO of food delivery platform Talabat. His venture capital firm Faith Capital took a majority stake in JustClean in 2017 and has poured more than $20 million into the company, most recently an $8 million investment in a Series B round in September 2020. Jaffar joined the team as CEO and oversees day-to-day operations. “We felt the space was large enough and the problem was big enough to build a successful business around,” he says.

However, both Al Enezi brothers retain significant shares and top leadership roles. Athbi, the eldest at 28, handles expansion and sales, while Nouri, 27, oversees technology, product development and marketing. Eventually, the plan is for the brothers to become co-CEOs. “That’s always been the plan and the plan continues,” says Athbi.

Against that backdrop, JustClean is playing a growing role in the laundry and cleaning business in the Middle East, another example of a traditional offline industry being brought online by entrepreneurs. “It’s a very big offline sector and it’s an old sector as well,” says Jaffar.

“We’re hoping to enable it through technology.”

The new funding is intended to propel growth in current markets and venture into other areas of the cleaning sector.

BY SAMUEL WENDEL

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Currently, the company works with over 500 laundries, while customers use its app to place several thousands of orders daily.

JustClean takes a commission from each order, but doesn’t add a markup or delivery fee; it’s the same price offered by laundries.

But these days the app is just one revenue stream for the company, which has over 200 employees.

JustClean is building out its core business in different ways. It has developed a softwareas-a-service platform customized for the cleaning industry that’s now used by hundreds of laundries. That’s built around point-of-sale technology, helping laundries serve customers F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

and manage and track their businesses. “Our online orders and their offline orders are all connected through one system,” says Nouri.

The company has also invested in a logistics fleet, assisting with laundry deliveries. Previously, it had an app for laundry drivers, but felt it could also offer improved delivery services. Today, JustClean employs drivers in Kuwait, the U.A.E. and Bahrain, and works with freelancers in Saudi Arabia. “We deal with the logistics, you deal with the service,” says Athbi.

Each vertical has a team, which Athbi says is basically equivalent to three different companies. And JustClean now offers a variety

JustClean founders, Athbi and Nouri Al Enezi, Mohammed Jaffar

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of services to app users through its different laundry partners, such as carpet cleaning and shoe cleaning.

Meanwhile, last year Faith Capital invested in Dubai’s Justmop, a home cleaning startup, which now works closely with JustClean’s team.

Then there’s car cleaning, which it currently offers in Bahrain and now in Kuwait too, as of September 2020.

JustClean has explored this space previously, investing in Dubai-based car care startup Keno in 2019. However, it exited that investment recently and the founders decline to discuss specifics.

Not surprisingly, the pandemic caused problems for JustClean. In Kuwait, for example, laundries were shut down. But lockdown restrictions varied by market, allowing room to operate. However, they were also concerned lockdowns would cause many laundries to fold, causing more issues for JustClean.

“We challenged our developers to come up with a new idea, a new app while working from home.”

The pandemic led to a couple of tough months, but JustClean’s team found ways to adapt. “We challenged our developers to come up with a new idea, a new app while working from home,” says Nouri. That resulted in JustDeliver.

Fortunately, JustClean avoided layoffs and was back operating normally by June. Widespread laundry closures didn’t materialize either, and the company focused on wooing back existing users. The founders say that in August the app actually saw user numbers rise above pre-pandemic levels, while customer retention rates returned to normal, around the 60-70% mark.

Ultimately, this is still a new company finding its footing. But Jaffar notes that JustClean is growing with good unit economics, with profitability not far off—something many fast-rising tech firms can’t claim. “In the end, these companies need to turn profitable,” he says.

Meanwhile, the company is also exploring further geographic expansion, including into non-Arabic speaking countries in 2021. Simultaneously, there’s plenty of opportunity left in the GCC. There are 50,000 F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

laundries across the region, says Athbi, part of a $3 billion laundry industry in the region. “So, we’ve still got a lot to do with laundry,” he says.

Looking ahead, Jaffar has lofty goals for the company. Unlike Talabat, which he sold to Germany’s Rocket Internet for $170 million in 2015, he isn’t planning for an exit here—he hopes to eventually take JustClean public. That’s something few tech companies in the Middle East have managed. “We want to be one of the first,” says Jaffar.

Either way, JustClean has already made an impact on the Middle East’s laundry business in just a few years.

It was an opportunity its founders came across after moving to Kuwait in their early twenties, after growing up in the U.K. (the brothers are half British). Arriving back in Kuwait after graduating, Athbi got a job at the National Bank of Kuwait in human resources, while Nouri worked as an engineer.

Settling into life in Kuwait was an adjustment. “We felt like we were just going to work, going to the gym,” says Athbi. The brothers founds themselves restless and drawn to the idea of starting a business.

Coming from the U.K., where most people wash their own clothes at home, they were struck by all the laundries in the Gulf country. Driving around they saw laundries everywhere, at the bottom of buildings, around every corner. “We said let’s have a look into buying one ourselves and see how it goes,” says Nouri.

They checked out a couple and met with owners, but came way unimpressed. “It wasn’t a big enough challenge for us, if you know what I mean,” says Nouri.

Athbi remembers sitting outside one Saturday night and seeing Talabat drivers going by—but at the same time, laundry vans were also out. “People were getting their clothes back to be ready to wear for the week,” he says. That got them thinking.

Talabat had just been sold to Rocket Internet, a big exit for the Middle East’s tech scene. The brothers figured that if Talabat could connect people to food with an app, couldn’t they do the same for laundry?

An app was an exciting idea, but they were just starting their careers and didn’t have savings. “We were a bit cautious, because it was going to cost a lot of money,” says Athbi. But they went for it anyway.

They secured a loan of roughly $90,000, and left their jobs. They then hired a local developer to build an app. It took about six months to launch, with the company originally called Masbagti, meaning “my laundry.” One early issue was training laundries to use the service. This was an old-school industry, not accustomed to digital technology. “We spent a lot of OCTOBER 2020

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time on that in the first two years,” says Athbi.

A couple of months after launching, an acquaintance invited them to present to investors. That was a surprising development. “We’d literally just started,” said Athbi. They went to the meeting and sitting there was Jaffar, fresh from selling Talabat and then setting up Faith Capital.

He was looking to get involved in new ventures.

“I thought I was young enough to solve another problem,” says Jaffar. Masbagti was brand new, but he was intrigued and stayed in touch with the founders over the coming months. “I was impressed with their entrepreneurial spirits,” he says.

He also saw promise in what they were doing. Faith Capital approached Deloitte to assist in exploring Masbagti’s addressable market. That took a couple of months, but the findings were promising. Eventually Faith Capital made its offer.

For the founders, that meant surrendering control— not always an easy choice for an entrepreneur.

However, it came with a chance to work alongside a seasoned professional. “We wanted to learn from someone who’s actually done it,” says Athbi.

They struck the deal in 2017. It was good timing.

“We were lucky to receive the investment,” says Athbi.

“We were literally on our last pennies.” They had miscalculated their budget, leaving no funds to market the company.

Following the investment, the company rebranded to JustClean—a more marketable name in different F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

countries, and less specific to laundry. The company also rolled out a new version of the app and began hiring, including bringing tech development in-house.

JustClean truly began growing in 2018, expanding into Bahrain, and the U.A.E. It entered Saudi Arabia in 2019. In new markets, the team found there were nuances in how laundries operated in different countries. “We have to adapt to the offline market, the different packages laundries provide, the different services they provide,” says Nouri.

To get customers onboard, JustClean opted to leave pricing alone, creating a marketplace atmosphere to incentivize competitive rates from laundries. Discounts are also commonplace on the platform.

At the same time, the company saw opportunities to diversify. “The majority of laundries were still run on pen and paper across the GCC,” says Athbi. That led JustClean to invest in building its software-as-a-service platform, as well as its logistics fleet. Those offerings are setting up JustClean to be more than just another app.

Laundry industry players have noticed, says Jaffar, and he expects to see increased competition in the space.

Laundry services may not be as flashy as other tech companies, but there’s clearly a local market for it.

Jaffar sees parallels to Talabat. When he got involved there in 2009, food delivery wasn’t seen as an interesting space, and people even criticized him for the move. A few years and quite a few million dollars later, people came around. “We believe the same thing will happen to this space,” says Jaffar.

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• THOUGHT LEADERS •

By Hussein Sayed, Chief Market Strategist for the Gulf and Middle East at FXTM

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Market Narratives And The Current Optimism People who watch financial markets every day for a living—traders, investors, speculators, analysts, bankers and so on— love to follow narratives. You could say that pinning a story to a big market move is why analysts exist, or at least can justify their existence. These past few months have therefore been interesting for the market voyeurs who, like many generally, have found it tough to explain the many stories moving around in the market grapevine.

Markets run on narratives because humans find it far easier to connect with a story, rather than, say a string of seemingly random numbers. Express the case for why the market sold off sharply one day but bounced right back the next in a series of stories and humans will be engaged and think they understand market moves.

The broader story that has been running for some time now is the hope for a “V-shaped” recovery that is backed up by economic data. Admittedly, this comes after some record-breaking negative figures (what do you expect when economies shutdown in an instant?), but equally we are seeing positive data released as economic life has endeavored to get back to some sort of normality.

Witness the bust-to-boom US jobs figures we have seen over the last quarter. A record-setting 20.5 million job losses in May, to the record monthly gain of 4.8 million jobs in June and another 1.76 million last month.

Of course, this is just a few months of reports and while exceeding expectations, the economy has still only regained 9.3 million of the 22 million jobs lost between February and April. More recently, US retail sales have returned to pre-crisis levels having surged in the last few months, with May logging the biggest monthly jump ever, although consumers have been boosted by stimulus checks which have now stopped being issued by the government.

Retail sales have on average accounted for 42% of total consumer spending in the U.S. over the past 10 years. In F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

turn, consumer spending is around 70% of total GDP, which implies that retail sales account for just under a third of GDP. It would appear then that the scale of the rebound here might be significant and that the V-shaped story is taking shape.

Locally, the pandemic has not hit the region as hard as expected. The number of COVID-related deaths in Arab countries, relative to their population, remains far below the rates experienced in some European and Asian countries.

It is hoped that the resumption of activities of all authorized business and commercial outlets, at least partially, will smoothen the normalization path.

The worst may be over for the Eurozone’s powerhouse economy as well, with a recent well-watched German business survey increasing for the fourth consecutive month. Together with the huge fiscal support extended by the government and the historic agreement of the EU Recovery Fund, the rebound of the bloc’s economy is enjoying some positive momentum.

And yet, a mass of uncertainties still lingers. Although U.S. manufacturing activity accelerated to its highest level in nearly 18 months in July, the resurgence in new infections is raising fears about the sustainability of the recovery. Will the furloughed workers become permanently jobless is a crucial question going forward, along with a much-predicted increase in bankruptcies.

There are plenty of stretched market-based indicators too, telling us how overbought and overvalued the markets are—though that is not to say they can’t extend.

A lot has been thrown at the V-shaped recovery story and the ongoing discussion around its validity is telling.

While the stock market goes ever higher with plentiful liquidity, the vaccine story certainly fits the bill in helping the real economy and there is genuine hope for the many ongoing trials. Perhaps inevitably, it may have to battle with numerous other market worries on the bumpy road to full recovery.

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Oman

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50 Years

Of Building Strength

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OMAN REPORT

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trategically located in the southeastern quarter of the Arabian Peninsula and overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, Oman has been considered a country of great economic and political importance for centuries. Bordered by the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, and with marine borders with Iran and Pakistan, the picturesque nation was revered for its trading potential and international outlook long before the United Arab Emirates made its mark.

In January this year Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said succeeded Sultan F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

Qaboos as the ruler of Oman. The later had ruled the sultanate for nearly five decades. However, over the last two decades Sultan Haitham was never far removed from the general political and economic climate in Oman. The new sultan previously held a number of important executive positions, the most significant of which was secretary general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before he became minister of heritage and culture for nearly two decades. He also served as chairman of the Oman 2040 Future Vision Main Committee,

which he considers to be a significant roadmap that provides a framework for governance and development in the coming decades.

Oman is home to 4.97 million people, and the country’s GDP stood at $77 billion in 2019. Like most global economies, the World Bank expects Oman’s economy to contract in 2020 due to the oil price slide and the COVID-19 public health response.

However, an increase in gas output and infrastructure spending plans is expected to help growth recover over 2021-22.

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Oman may be facing tough times, but the future looks bright.

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Sheikh Khalid Abdullah Ali Al Khalili, Chairman

Khalid Al Kayed, CEO

Bank Nizwa: Establishing Leadership In Islamic Banking Sheikh Khalid Abdullah Ali Al Khalili, Chairman, and Khalid Al Kayed, CEO at Bank Nizwa reveal how the bank has become one of the fastest-growing Islamic banks in Oman.

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n less than eight years, Oman has become home to the world’s 15th largest Islamic banking industry, commanding a 13.4% share of the country’s total banking assets. Bank Nizwa is at the forefront of this growth and continues its success journey by achieving impressive financial results. It recorded a growth rate of 37% in the first half of this year despite COVID-19 related market challenges.

Since inception about eight years ago, our objective has been to script a worthy legacy for Islamic banking in the sultanate and play a meaningful role in its economic growth and social development. Bank Nizwa has endeavored to be the financial partner of choice for the people as well as for corporate. We are proud to say that today, Bank Nizwa is Oman’s leading and most trusted Islamic bank. Being

the first Islamic bank in the country, we have successfully pioneered change that is progressive, as well as rooted in the foundations of Islam.

Bank Nizwa’s net profits rose by 37% to $15 million for the half year ending June 30, 2020, compared to the same period in 2019. Maintaining a solid growth, the bank’s total assets also increased to over $2.6 billion, posting a growth rate of 14%. Through

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this Bank Nizwa has further cemented its leadership position in both wholesale and retail banking segments in terms of service excellence, franchise strength, and business capabilities.

In line with the core values of prudence and innovation that formed our institution, we are committed to providing innovative financial solutions that adhere to Sharia, with an aim to offer customers a unique banking experience, keeping in mind today’s dynamic requirements. We look forward to setting new industry benchmarks and placing Oman higher on the Islamic banking landscape globally.

Our goal is to serve both personal and business customers in Oman through transparent processes by providing innovative Islamic products and services combined with exceptional and responsive customer service. By expanding our reach through branch networks and digital channels, we are getting closer to customers to better understand their needs and introduce our services to a wider audience that can benefit from new, untapped opportunities. Over the years, we have witnessed steady growth in our customer base as more people seek an alternative solution to conventional banking.

Bank Nizwa is playing a significant role in supporting the government’s diversification plan as well as Oman’s 2040 vision. It has effectively closed several milestone financial transactions in the manufacturing, utilities, construction, retail, hospitality, aviation, logistics, tourism, education, waste management, metals and mining, medical, and food sectors.

With 100% Sharia-compliant solutions, Bank Nizwa has also successfully carved out a niche market in fast-expanding sectors, like realestate infrastructure and utilities. The team works closely with clients to provide complete tailor-made business

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solutions across industry segments. Its core strength lies in project appraisal and advisory roles in syndication of the client requirements among local and regional banks. As the largest and fastest-growing full-fledged Islamic bank in the sultanate, Bank Nizwa is leading the sector’s growth by providing a wide range of financial products and services to its customers.

In line with its strategy to empower communities with the benefits of Islamic finance, Bank Nizwa provides across-the-board access to Islamic finance, banking and investment.

It has raised awareness on Islamic banking in the sultanate through an extensive outreach programme by engaging the community on the values of Sharia-compliant banking to build a sustainable society and economy. This has helped Bank Nizwa to earn the trust of customers in enabling them to lead financially-secure lifestyles without compromising on their religious beliefs.

Bank Nizwa has been exceeding customer expectations through a welldiversified product portfolio in retail and corporate segments, introducing innovative and secured digital banking solutions. The bank’s upscale wealth management services are an acknowledgement and appreciation of the depth of the customer’s relationship with Bank Nizwa. High-net-worth individuals are welcome to be part of this exclusive group, which will set them apart for a range of personalized services, exclusive products, higher benefits, and discounted rates.

As a Bank Nizwa wealth management customer, account holders have direct access to a relationship manager and the branch manager, who assist in streamlining banking experience with priority service at every point, and also offer advice on financial opportunities as they arise.

The Mudaraba investment options, Wakala investment advisory, platinum

Bank Nizwa’s net profits rose by 37% to $15 million for the half year ending June 30, 2020, compared to the same period in 2019. Maintaining a solid growth, the bank’s total assets also increased to over $2.6 billion, posting a growth rate of 14%. debit and credit cards and other value-added services form part of Bank Nizwa’s wealth management portfolio.

Winning over 27 local, regional and international awards in just over eight years of operation, Bank Nizwa continues to hold the top spot among Oman’s Islamic financial institutions. We firmly believe that our contribution through the business of both intermediation and participation will lead to the economic, social, and ethical wellbeing of society. Through such associations, the bank has been and will continue to play a significant role in supporting the government’s diversification plan across all sectors.

In Bank Nizwa, it is our conscious and concerted path to invest in projects that not only promise great returns but also positively impact the communities we operate in.

www.banknizwa.om

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Oman’s road to recovery While Oman has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Oman’s government has been proactively making efforts to bolster the economy. for example, the newly announced privatization law, commercial company

law and bankruptcy law will give much needed stimulus to grow foreign direct investment (FDI).

Oman’s economy will recover with the implementation of substantial fiscal measures to curtail the government deficits, a new push on privatization, and prioritizing capital projects.

COVID-19 is expected to disrupt non-oil economic activities, with negative impacts on retail, services and tourism. The government has already embarked on implementing reforms to trim its burgeoning public wage bill and introduce VAT, among other measures. However, these measures will need to be sequenced with the crisis response.

Oman (a non-OPEC member) could increase oil production after the lapse of the OPEC+ agreement, to mitigate the widening of the deficit. The potential boost of the government’s diversification efforts through transport and tourism would continue to facilitate an increase in nonhydrocarbon

growth to about 2% over 2021-2022.

Inflation is expected to increase to 1% in 2020, and to further accelerate to 3% in 2021 reflecting the againdelayed introduction of VAT.

Vision 2040 Oman’s Vision 2040 is the Sultanate’s gateway to overcome challenges, keep pace with regional and global changes, generate and seize opportunities to foster economic competitiveness and social well-being, stimulate growth, and build confidence in all economic, social and developmental relations nationwide.

The vision was developed over several stages. The committees started by identifying the vision themes and pillars, followed by a current status analysis and identification of national priorities. To achieve role integration, the Future Foresight Forum was organized, followed by several workshops to create scenarios and set the vision strategic directions, goals, KPIs and targets.

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Fiscal and external deficits will remain under strain due to low oil and gas prices, whereas rigid recurrent spending will keep public debt high, which is estimated to exceed 70% of GDP in 2020 and beyond. Real GDP growth is estimated to have decelerated to 0.5% in 2019, down from a recovery of 1.8% in 2018. This is largely driven by 1% (y/y) decline in oil production, capped by the since-lapsed OPEC+ production deal. The non-oil economy is estimated to have been subdued due to the slowdown in industrial activities and services sector. Inflationary pressures are estimated to remain muted at 0.1% in 2019, reflecting weak domestic demand and tame food and housing prices.

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OCTAL Redefines Manufacturing Nicholas Barakat, CEO of OCTAL, explains how the company is ensuring continuity of the global food packaging supply chain.

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nder the premise “From Oman to the World,” PET packaging manufacturer OCTAL is redefining manufacturing and creating a name not only for itself, but positioning the sultanate as a hub for the international PET industry. Successfully mitigating supply-chain challenges presented

by COVID-19, OCTAL’s business continues to adapt to any potential impacts. Currently operating with regular productivity, the company’s risk planning is an integral part of operations to fulfill all sheet and resin orders from its manufacturing facilities in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. Responding to food and beverage packaging requirements, the company registered a 15% increase in PET volumes compared to the same period last year. OCTAL has deployed its substantial capacity for operational flexibility and reliability, ensuring essential food supplies remain available

to consumers around the world. Beyond timely delivery, a robust supply chain has enabled customers to meet surges in consumer demand, while providing them with superior production efficiency, optimized cost structures, and an improved environmental profile.

Between February and May 2020, OCTAL has produced and shipped 247,000 MT of PET sheet and resin to various destinations around the world.

As essential businesses shift to more sustainable approaches, OCTAL recognizes its role as a major part of the global supply chain for food packaging. The company provides innovative solutions in advanced material science, and is stepping-up to meet demand. Especially during these times of a new norm, its stringent manufacturing protocols are to supporting global food security. This responsibility has guided its growth to date, and will continue to do so now and into the future.

OCTAL is steadily and successfully expanding its presence into wider geographical markets, including Latin America and Asia, as the global demand for PET continues to surge.

Bolstered by its sustainability features, PET or polyethylene terephthalate, the most recycled of plastics has witnessed a global call-to-action during COVID-19 with single-use packaging helping prevent virus transmission.

OCTAL, which last year secured $625 million in financial backing, continues to position itself for strong and rapid growth. In addition to recording a 26% increase in profitability, OCTAL also reported an 8% year-on-year increase in sales across its main segments, sheet and resin. Future ambitions see the company striving for a 20% reduction in the development cycle of new products, while building its dedicated recycling platform, and a proprietary platform to integrate its PET resin capacity within five years.

The successful model and growth of OCTAL shows that value chains can be created and nurtured, feeding into the growth of the manufacturing industry in Oman and from Oman to the world.

With a robust R&D culture and a global network across 140 markets, OCTAL is cementing its role as a trusted partner of choice, industrial provider, and responsible manufacturer.

www.octal.com

The thoughts expressed in this advertorial are those of the client. Forbes Middle East does not endorse any claims made or opinions expressed in this paid program.

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incentives. The competitiveness of the Omani economy will, therefore, increase both regionally and globally, and growth rates will improve and stabilize in a sustainable manner.

In order to achieve their economic goals, a few sectors will be of greater importance where the country has an immense opportunity to grow.

When it comes to trade, Oman had total exports worth $41.8 billion and total imports worth $25.8 billion in 2019, leading to a positive trade balance of $16 billion. Oman’s exports of goods and services account for 58.2% of GDP. The top export items are petroleum and natural gas, contributing a combined $28.9

Port of Salalah in Oman

Trade and logistics Logistics and trade is one of the most important strategic industries for the future of Oman, and the government has invested a lot on infrastructure to fulfil Oman’s ambition to reclaim its 2,000-year-old regional trade leadership.

Oman is strategically located in the Arabian Gulf and is centrally located between Asia and the Middle East. Recently the sultanate has been developing its logistics infrastructure and is slowly becoming a bigger player in regional and global trade. Political neutrality and good relations with regional as well as global powers is another advantage when it comes to trade and logistics. Oman is the only GCC country to have diplomatic relations with all countries in the Middle East.

billion to the country’s exports.

Petroleum products were also the biggest import, with automobiles, communication infrastructure, iron ore and Semi-fin products making up the top five.

The U.A.E. is Oman’s biggest trading partner for both exports and imports. Traditionally, the U.A.E.’s ports have served as the main trading points for Oman given the proximity of the two countries and a developed road network between the two countries.

Currently logistics and transportation contribute just $2.8 billion or 3.7% to the economy.

That number is low considering the country’s geographical and diplomatic advantages. One of the reasons for the low share of logistics to the industry could be a lack of port infrastructure.

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Oman’s Vision 2040, on the economic front, focuses on creating a favorable environment to attract talent in the labor market, build a competitive business climate, and achieve comprehensive regional development through decentralization.

These broad economic goals will be achieved through the optimal and balanced use of land and natural resources and the protection of the environment to bring about food, water and energy security, as well as providing good infrastructure to smart and sustainable cities with advanced IT infrastructure.

In order to achieve these goals, the sultanate will need stable economic leadership and management. The main role the country’s leadership will play is to set and align the fiscal, monetary, trade, investment, industrial and labor market policies in such a manner so as to contribute to the development and implementation of economic plans, programs and projects in line with the strategic directions.

The national priorities will constitute a framework for leadership, building on the sultanate’s comparative advantages, and its aspiration to build a competitive knowledge-based economy and keep abreast of economic and technical developments.

The vision aims to reinforce upstream and downstream integration among economic sectors to expand the production and export base, diversify trading partners, deepen investment in high value-added sectors, and enhance the contribution of non-oil sectors to GDP. Achieving this diversity and integration highly depends on developing local capabilities in innovation and creativity, promoting entrepreneurship, along with preparing fertile ground for legislation and

The future starts here Omantel 5G

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The True Potential Of 5G Andrew Hanna, Chief Commercial Officer, and Dr Ali Al Hashmi, General Manager of Network Planning, at Omantel, reveal how the company is pioneering 5G and the impact COVID-19 has had on its plans.

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G is different, 5G is complex, 5G is the future. These have been some of the general statements surrounding the revolutionary next-gen telecom network. However, that future, which had been envisaged a little ahead, has presented itself now. The coronavirus pandemic has shifted it forward, giving telecommunication companies, operators and developers a different perspective on the opportunities that can be capitalized with 5G deployment.

5G in Oman was first rolled out

by Omantel at the end of 2019. Like many countries in the Middle East, Oman stands on the cusp of a new internet revolution that will make industries and consumers evolve their operations and usage. At a panel discussion at the 5G MENA Virtual

Andrew Hanna, Chief Commercial Officer

Conference earlier this year, we discussed Omantel’s 5G infrastructure, future plans and opportunities and how the COVID-19 situation has changed consumer behavior and Omantel’s business strategy.

Before Omantel rolled out 5G in November 2019 in select areas, it already had in place a robust roadmap, and close to a 100 sites. There has been a gradual expansion since then. The pandemic itself, however, has presented several avenues, which Omantel is working to fully capitalize on.

COVID-19 slowed down things a little, but the roll-out came at a good time, just before the lockdown, because it gave an insight into consumer behavior and how people were using the service. It has also given time to B2B and B2C customers to understand the potential of 5G. It

has been an interesting test. Omantel has not been able to roll out the 5G network as widely as hoped because of the pandemic, but we have seen a strong uptake, and customers’ responses during the pandemic has exceeded the expectations.

Currently, Omantel’s 5G service is available through fixed wireless broadband, but is capable of more than that. We have not even begun to scratch the surface of 5G’s capabilities in terms of speed, accessibility, quality of service, industry-specific digital solutions, etc.

5G is a golden opportunity and telecom companies and operators will not be making the same mistakes they did with 4G when they did not use the technology in the most optimal way.

Now, there is a level of understanding and maturity. Operators have learned

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“An initial high investment should not be a hurdle in moving fast because 5G is an enabler for efficiency, innovation and more customized solutions.”

Dr. Ali Al Hashmi, General Manager of Network Planning

from their 4G days and are looking to offer enhanced value to their customers in order to get smarter returns on their 5G investment.

Omantel has identified a number of services for B2B and B2C. The rollout roadmap Omantel built may have slowed down a little because of the pandemic but the company has added a number of partners that are capable of delivering some of the services and are waiting for the telecom giant to build on top of the network that it has rolled out so far.

So how can 5G be commercialized for optimal return on investment? An initial high investment should not be a hurdle in moving fast because 5G is an enabler for efficiency, innovation and more customized solutions. We can do this together with operators and consumers. Will it mean

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charging a premium to customers or be really about the quality of service? The answer, it seems, is that commercialising 5G will have to be more of a balancing act, and not a onesize-fits-all approach.

Some operators are selling access, some are selling quality of service, some are selling, speed. But it’s going to be a combination of all of these in relation to the segment targeted. If we move a little bit away from just its capacity, we can understand how it can be used in different industry verticals.

5G brings industrial IT to enterprises. B2B was an opportunity never leveraged properly in the world of wireless and remains an avenue that will define 5G services. 5G will create an environment for small and large enterprises to move towards efficiency through the Internet of Things, M2M,

Cloud data, etc. The verticals where 5G can be deployed across the GCC and the MENA region range from aviation and logistics to oil and gas.

The pandemic has created a sharp shift towards healthcare, e-learning, home entertainment, gaming, augmented and virtual reality, use of Big Data and location-based services.

The promise of success lies in close relationships with companies and partners that are starting to understand the 5G world and develop suitable applications to offer the true potential of 5G to both B2B and B2C in utilities and manufacturing.

There is a new need for skills to be a link between telecom operators and different industries. As a telecom operator, we have to understand the procedures, challenges, and unique requirements of each industry we are providing services to. We need to collaborate with application providers.

That’s the new norm with 5G. It’s more than just connectivity.

www.omantel.com

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and the Port of Rotterdam. It is one of the few global ports equipped with deep-water jetties capable of handling the world`s largest ships. The port is accompanied by a free zone, which will be a 4,500-hectare development that, together with SOHAR Port, has attracted over $27 billion in investments. The first phase of the free zone has been developed, with almost 75% of the 500 hectares leased.

The Port of Salalah, which has been operating since November 1998, is being developed further. The port is partly owned and managed by APM Terminals, one of the largest container terminal operators in the world.

Strategically located at the major eastwest shipping lane, the Port of Salalah is made up of a container terminal with seven berths of up to 18m draft and a general cargo terminal of 14 berths of up to 18m draft. Since its start in 1996, the port has invested around $800 million in infrastructure, which includes cranes to handle the world’s largest vessels, 18m of depth, 2.4km of container berth, and plenty of yard capacity to ensure growth.

Banking The banking industry is important to the growth of any economy. It is the banking system that facilitates the creation of capital, and finances growth across various industries. The goal of the Central Bank of Oman is to “promote the development of banking institutions, which will ensure the maintenance of monetary and financial stability, contribute to the economic, industrial and financial growth and enhance the position of the sultanate in international financial affairs.”

Until 1970, Oman had no supervisory body for its monetary and banking system. With the introduction of its own national currency in Oman, a need arose to establish an authority to deal with currency management, which led to the development of the Central Bank of Oman in 1974.

The Central Bank supervises the commercial banks in Oman, as well as issuing the currency, maintaining the peg with the dollar, and playing a role in managing the country’s deficit.

The Omani banking sector remained robust, with sound asset

Oman's Central Bank in Muscat

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Since 2016 the country has focused on creating infrastructure to make it a regional and international trade hub. The country consolidated its transport and logistics industry into one entity—the ASYAD Group—in 2016 to maximize the financial returns and economic impact of government logistics investments. The ASYAD Group brings together 16 logistics companies and joint ventures under one entity, with the goal of improving performance, creating efficiencies and offering economies of scale.

The ASYAD Group’s goal is to transform the country into one of the world’s top ten logistics hubs by 2040.

The new ports could transform the sultanate into a global and regional logistics leader. The group is comprised of three deep ports and three free zones supported by Oman’s five airports, a new rail network at a planned cost of $20 billion, and road infrastructure on which the government will spending a further $10 billion.

The most prominent port that the sultanate is developing is the SOHAR Port, which is a 50:50 joint venture between the government of Oman

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A Proven Track Record of Excellence

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As a leading financial services institution in the Sultanate of Oman, Bank Muscat has a proven track record of excellence in service.

B

ank Muscat today enjoys over a 35% market share in Oman with assets over $32.3 billion and around two million customers. Established in 1982 and headquartered in Muscat, it has the largest banking network in the country with over 170 branches and 740 ATMs and CDMs. Its international operations consist of a branch each in Riyadh and Kuwait as well as Representative Offices in Dubai and Singapore. Over the past 38 years, Bank Muscat has been closely associated with the progress and development of Oman in all sectors.

Its lines of business include personal banking, corporate banking, wholesale banking and Meethaq Islamic Banking.

The bank has won a number of prestigious global and local awards in recognition of its achievements.

As a prolific innovator, it has been recognized as a multiple award winner across different categories receiving as many as 29 awards and accolades in 2019 and 19 in 2020 as of September. Bank Muscat has been repeatedly chosen as the best bank

in Oman by prestigious international publications over the years based on a number of critical factors like growth in assets, profitability, geographic reach, strategic relationships, new business development and innovation in products. The bank was also recognised

by Forbes Middle East as one of Middle East’s Top 100 Companies in 2020.

The bank’s edge in hi-tech products and services, including electronic payments, fund transfers and digital banking services has also been recognized with it consecutively winning awards for being the best consumer digital bank in Oman in 2019 and 2020.

The bank’s Global Trade Services (GTS) has won it awards for being the best trade finance bank in Oman in 2019 and 2020 in recognition of its role as a facilitator of exports and imports from Oman. The bank was also recognized for its base metals forecasts in 2019. The Bank Muscat Oryx Fund, which has completed 25 successful years, is a repeat winner of a best MENA equity fund award. The

bank has also won Muscat Securities Market’s Quality of Disclosure Award in recognition of its initiatives for transparency.

Bank Muscat’s Meethaq, a pioneer of Islamic banking in Oman, has adopted best practices in Islamic banking and finance worldwide to provide a robust model that benefits its customers. Meethaq provides several value-added services and exclusive lifestyle privileges to its customers through its 22 branches across Oman.

Going forward, the bank is focused on sustaining competitiveness and building further on product and service quality. Driven by robust policies to achieve global best practices and its customer-centric approach, Bank Muscat is focused on consolidating its operational excellence, which has set it a class apart.

www.bankmuscat.com

The thoughts expressed in this advertorial are those of the client. Forbes Middle East does not endorse any claims made or opinions expressed in this paid program.

F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

OCTOBER 2020

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quality and strong capital buffers. In 2019 Omani banks posted reasonable profits that allowed organic growth, and strengthened capital buffers. The sector remained fairly liquid, with both liquidity coverage ratio and net stable funding ratio above the regulatory requirements.

The countercyclical measures adopted

by CBO in early 2018 also helped banks stay on strong footing.

With Oman’s economy undergoing a diversification-oriented transformation over the years, the banks are well-poised to support and benefit from the economic diversification and growth. In 2019, the listed Omani banks had revenues of about $4.5 billion and an asset base of approximately $80 billion. Bank Muscat is the largest bank in Oman with assets of $30 billion, making up over a third of Oman’s banking assets.

Islamic banking in Oman has expanded rapidly since its introduction in 2013. It has experienced a cumulative annual growth rate of 28% in the last five years and 11% growth in 2019. The pace of growth F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

has been ranked among the fastest globally according to the International Monetary Fund. The sultanate’s total Islamic banking assets stood at $12.7 billion as of April 2020, which is 14% of total banking assets.

Insurance industry In times of turmoil, the importance of insurance becomes even greater, providing confidence to the population to take risks.

Oman’s insurance sector is a highly competitive market, with 20 players vying for market share. It is dominated by the non-life segment, with over 88% share of gross premiums in 2018.

This is expected to be mainly driven by the rising trend of Omanization and economic and population growth. The insurance sector has been regulated by the Capital Markets Authority since 2004. Before that it was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

In 2018, about 68% of Oman’s population was within the working age group of 21–60 years. This,

coupled with low existing insurance penetration (1.5%), provides substantial growth opportunities. Moderate economic growth, government initiatives, a hard push towards Omanization, and low insurance penetration are likely to boost the insurance business.

One of the growth drivers for the insurance industry in Oman is its favorable demographics.

Oman’s population constitutes two key segments: a large expatriate base; and a significant number of young and employed people. Both of these are expected to considerably impact the demand for life and nonlife insurance segments.

Oman is also making rapid progress in implementing its strategy to diversify from the hydrocarbon sector, resulting in increased activity in other sectors such as manufacturing and services. Growth across such sectors is presenting significant opportunities for insurers. Also, the rapidly growing SME sector in Oman presents a key opportunity for insurers as generally these firms are run by entrepreneurial people that are more open to insurance as a means to protect newly-created assets compared to their established counterparts.

With the onset of new mandatory health insurance regulations from 2020, the health insurance segment (less than 1% of the market as of 2018) is expected to grow rapidly in the medium term. National insurance companies are market leaders in terms of the number of policies issued. Local companies account for 78% of the total policies issued in the country and the remaining share is held by foreign companies.

OCTOBER 2020

lexey Stiop / Shutterstock.com

O M A N R EP O RT

P RO M OT I O N

Surviving Through Challenging Times

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S. Venkatachalam, CEO of the National Life & General Insurance Company (NLGIC), reveals how the company has been able to grow in 2020 while supporting the continued efforts of Oman.

T

his year has been one of the most challenging in recent history, with the outbreak of COVID-19 and dwindling oil prices having a significant impact on business, not only at NLGIC but across the world.

When Oman went into lockdown to prevent the spread of the pandemic, we had to find new ways to take care of the safety of our employees, customers and business partners, and ensure the smooth functioning of all business operations. As a major employer and insurance provider, we have some moral responsibilities towards the people of Oman, so we contributed $455,000 to the endowment fund supporting government initiatives to overcome the threat of COVID 19 and implement various digital initiatives to spread awareness and keep people safe.

In the first quarter of 2020 we saw dwindling financial performance, but we overcame the situation and salvaged the situation by the end of the first half of the year. Being in the insurance industry, it was also a challenge to provide insurance cover without break to our customers, renew their policies in a timely way, and handle after sales services and claims, while at the same time keeping in line with the directives given by the government authorities to keep the nation and its people safe.

Along with our business continuity plan measures, we were well equipped digitally to provide insurance to our customers through a convenient userfriendly online platform. Our entire technology infrastructure, systems and resources were ready to serve our customers and business partners through our digital capabilities, which was a result of the digital transformation we went through a few years ago.

With all these measures in place, we recorded impressive business performance by the end of June.

Though our gross written premium fell by 2%, our net underwriting results grew by 58% and investment income by 39% over first half of last year. Our

profit after tax registered 111% growth over the same period (profit reported for the first half this year is $28 million).

Our medical and motor insurance portfolios also did well in the retail segment. In the medical insurance sector, we continue to maintain our leadership position in the industry, and we are one of the top players in motor insurance. We optimized our reinsurance strategy and improved our underwriting process as well as having a prudent investment management, which gave us good financial gains.

We believe in living up to challenges and providing our products and services in the best possible way thanks to our dedicated team of insurance professionals, who came together to make this happen during such demanding times.

Going forward, we will continue to invest in enhancing our digital capabilities, which enable us to reach our customers and business partners with reduced operational costs and better efficiency. Also, as part of our growth strategy, we are looking to expand into other countries in the region and other potential markets outside.

www.nlg.om

The thoughts expressed in this advertorial are those of the client. Forbes Middle East does not endorse any claims made or opinions expressed in this paid program.

F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

OCTOBER 2020

O M A N R EP O RT

Technology and telecom

recent years. A total of seven network operators cater to a population of approximately four million.

Oman has an extremely high mobile phone penetration, at 131% for voice mobile phones and 104.4% when it comes to mobile internet.

This means Oman has 31% more cell phone connections than it does people.

The monthly average data usage per subscriber in Oman is 5.58GB. During COVID-19, the telecoms market experienced a higher demand for services with lockdown and lower average spend due to some special offers by service providers as compared to previous quarters.

There was a 29.4% growth in total mobile phone usage, although active mobile telephone subscriptions dropped by 5.6%. There was a 46%

drop in total fixed line usage, and a 19.22% reduction in the average spend (revenue) presubscription.

When it comes to data consumption there was a 27.61% growth in total mobile broadband usage (mobile data) although active subscriptions dropped by 8.72%. Fixed broadband usage grew 31.8% in terms of total GBs consumed.

The total domestic mobile minutes represented 72.1% on net, 23.5% off net and 4.3% mobile to fixed. On net ratio can be justified by the competitive promotional packages per calls offered for the same network.

The transformative power of the combination of telecom with technology was shown during the peak of lockdown. ICT services helped enterprises and government entities across the sultanate to remotely collaborate and work efficiently from home during the pandemic.

In December last year, Oman’s first 5G network was launched. In future, this will contribute to various sectors including education, healthcare, oil and gas, tourism, transportation, entertainment, etc. This is attributable to the massive speeds of this new technology and its close-to-zero latency, which enables the introduction of the 4th industrial revolution technologies such as virtual reality, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing. The maximum benefit of this new technology may still take a long time to achieve.

Conclusion Oman has a lot going in its favor.

The country has a young, educated population, a strategic geographic location, and a diverse and scenic landscape. The leadership has been successful in maintaining good relations with all countries in the region. While the country is having some trouble diversifying its economy away from oil and has fiscal deficits, the future looks bright for Oman.

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OCTOBER 2020

Suwin / Shutterstock.com

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Today, technology and telecom are intertwined. The telecommunications and technology ecosystem in Oman consists of many stakeholders, including government organizations, service providers, content and application providers, equipment manufacturers, cloud computing/data centers providers, etc. The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) oversees all of these stakeholders and sets out standardized policies. It is responsible for formulating various standards and specifications for equipment used by licensees for providing telecom and internet services.

Oman has established itself as one of the most progressive telecom sectors in the region in terms of liberalization and the promotion of competition in

P RO M OT I O N

Building For The Future Areej Mohsin Haider Darwish, Chairperson of Mohsin Haider Darwish LLC (MHD), discusses how the company has faced recent challenges, and its growth plans in line with Vision 2040.

What is the legacy MHD has set in Oman?

MHD is a family business which is managed by me and my sister Lujaina Darwish. It was set up by my late father, Mohsin Haider Darwish. The organization has achieved phenomenal progress over the years and contributed to the economic growth, development and prosperity of the country.

Our legacy has been to make a noteworthy contribution to the country and future generations through integrity, perseverance, determination, and effective leadership. We have made MHD a pioneer in business circles with our flagship brands. We have set a legacy of innovation, entering new markets and growing our organization against all odds whereby we have created value for our customers. We have also instilled a positive organizational culture as we believe that a positive culture is key to sustainable business success. Our aim is to leave a legacy that will continue to make an impact as our responsibility to the country and its people goes beyond today and tomorrow.

How has MHD tackled the challenges faced during COVID-19?

COVID-19 has posed challenges around the world and the impact has been far-reaching. At MHD, we have devised business continuity plans, which helped us to overcome challenges as

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Areej Mohsin Haider Darwish Chairperson

we identified the potential issues and developed an action plan. We leveraged digitalization and technology to address some disruptions. We set up the e-commerce website for our automotive sector to stay connected with our customers. Our primary concern during the pandemic has been the safety and well-being of our staff. We implemented remote working arrangements and strengthened health and safety measures as part of Supreme Committee guidelines. Though a challenge, I see this pandemic as a learning experience. We remain positive and believe these dark clouds will eventually have a silver lining.

We remain focused on the bigger picture.

What are your feelings about Omani woman in the corporate world?

I am proud of the fact that Omani women are making a mark for themselves across different sectors. The trend towards women in leadership positions is on the rise. The increasing participation of women is largely attributed to the support mechanism and assistance that women have received over the years.

The late His Majesty Sultan Qaboos stressed the importance of Omani women playing a role in society and presented them with equal opportunities in education, employment and social development. His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik too has accorded special attention to women and

Honorable Lujaina Mohsin Haider Darwish Deputy Chairperson

appointed eight women into the government, including three ministers.

Women have proved themselves in every sector in Oman and actively contributed to national development.

How is the future of MHD aligned with Vision 2040?

Planning for the future, though difficult, is essential. It’s hard to predict what’s coming next but we need to stay ahead of the curve to be successful. Oman is steadily diversifying its economic base from hydrocarbons to sectors like logistics, manufacturing and tourism in line with Tanfeedh’s vision. Vision 2040 seeks to catapult the country into the ranks of the world’s most developed nations with economic diversification and sustainable development as key features.

At MHD LLC, we look at diversifying our sources of revenue in line with the country’s vision by venturing into new markets and diversifying into new sectors by bringing new products and international brands to Oman.

Diversifying will enhance our business presence into new territories and help build a bigger reach.

www.mhdoman.com

The thoughts expressed in this advertorial are those of the client. Forbes Middle East does not endorse any claims made or opinions expressed in this paid program.

F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

OCTOBER 2020

• THE PROFILE •

THE PROFILE

88

THE

RISE AND RISE OF

TYLER PERRY FROM “POOR AS HELL” TO BILLIONAIRE: HOW TYLER PERRY BUILT AN ENTERTAINMENT EMPIRE AND CHANGED SHOW BUSINESS FOREVER.

“D

amn, it’s hot out here,” says Tyler Perry, who isn’t making it easy on himself, clad in all black but for the shock of a white mask, as he directs a 12-person crew through a scene for the BET comedy Sistas. Last year, Perry might have avoided shooting in Atlanta’s July sun, but in this coronavirus era, you take any window you can, and “Camp Quarantine” at his Tyler Perry Studios is trying to pioneer post-pandemic entertainment making.

“Get out of the car,” he calls out to an actor in a cop car who walks over to a silver pickup driven by show regular Devale Ellis. Then he feeds Ellis his line—“What’d I do?” No one seems to have seen the script. When you’re looking to get an entire season of primetime television in the can in 11 days—all before the rest of Hollywood has made it out of hiding—corners must be cut.

Away from the shoot, sitting alone on a metal folding chair in the center of a cavernous and empty soundstage, a container of Lysol wipes at his feet, Perry explains his method. “I mostly go on my gut and my instinct. I like to challenge the system and see what I can do differently.”

BY MADELINE BERG

That’s an especially winning strategy in a system that feels stacked against you. Mostly dismissed by the Hollywood establishment and even some other Black luminaries (Spike Lee once derided Perry’s crass slapstick approach as “coonery buffoonery” before later relenting), Perry has succeeded for two reasons: He has honed a product that too many others viewed as destined for the discount bin. And he made sure to control it all.

The 51-year-old entertainer owns the entirety of his creative output, including more than 1,200 episodes of television, 22 feature films and at least two dozen stage plays, as well as a 330-acre studio lot at the edge of Atlanta’s southern limits. He used that control to leverage a deal with ViacomCBS that pays him $150 million a year for new content and gives him an equity stake in BET+, the streaming service it debuted last September. Forbes estimates Perry has earned more than $1.4 billion in pretax income since 2005, which he used to buy homes in Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as well as two planes. Quite a lifestyle for a once-homeless playwright raised in poverty in New Orleans. Today, Forbes estimates his net worth at $1 billion, with a clear path to future membership in The Forbes 400.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ETHAN PINES FOR FORBES

HALAN

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One-Man Show Tyler Perry, shot at his studios in southern Atlanta, October 2019 F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

OCTOBER 2020

Rallying Around Madea

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natural ham, Perry grew up making his mother laugh with impersonations. He was dealing with more than poverty: He describes an upbringing by an abusive man who he later learned was not his father. He was inspired to write out the stress he was feeling after watching an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, and spent his 20s touring small theaters around the country performing the plays he wrote, produced and starred in—a crash course in what was to come.

“You got to understand, I had no mentors,” Perry says. “My father doesn’t know anything about business, and my uncles and mother, they know nothing about this. I didn’t go to business school. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned in progress.”

After dropping out of high school, he gained knowledge any way he could. In his early 20s, he worked at the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans, home to the annual National Association of Television Program Executives conference. The young Perry would use badges left behind in empty rooms to sneak into closed gatherings. One highlight: meeting gameshow host Pat Sajak.

He began writing scripts while selling cars and serving as a bill collector. He eventually cobbled together $12,000, which he used to rent space at a community theater in Atlanta to produce a work he had drafted in his spare time.

The play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, was a story of child-abuse survivors. It was hardly an overnight success. At one point it wasn’t generating enough money to enable him to pay his rent, and for three months, he lived out of his car on and off while he tweaked the production, working out the kinks until it started to garner some notice. He designed the set, made the programs and hung the lights; he even sold snacks during intermission.

“It took me I don’t know how many days to finally get him convinced that the writer, director, does not do this,” says Arthur Primas, Perry’s promoter for more than two decades.

Perry toured relentlessly, slowly building a strong following among Black Americans, particularly the churchgoing set—older women like his mother, who had their burdens to bear and relished the chance to have someone give them a voice and, even better, a laugh. His iconic character, Madea, a straight-talking grandmother with a bad wig, a large stomach and even larger breasts, delivered her homespun moralism with brutally honest humor, becoming a must-see F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

spectacle on the so-called “Chitlin Circuit,” a loosely defined network of small theaters in Black communities nationwide.

“I was aware of the traveling plays, but I never really took them seriously because . . . I considered myself a person who appreciates theater and Broadway,” Winfrey says. “But I went to see one in Los Angeles, and I was not just moved by it, I was changed by it.”

She invited Perry on her talk show in 2001, when he was in his early 30s. Onscreen they shared the requisite inspirational language of tenacity and renewal, but backstage they mined another seam altogether: money. Winfrey, who by then owned her show and Harpo, the company that produced it, offered Perry a secret, one he was already beginning to learn on his own: the importance of “writing your own checks” and being fully in control.

She became a friend, sounding board and, perhaps most importantly, a catalyst. Even before he made his first film or TV show, Perry hauled in more than $100 million from theater ticket sales, moved $20 million worth of merchandise and collected another $30 million selling videos of the performances.

It was time for him to go to Hollywood.

Retreat To Atlanta

T

he introduction was made at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, a 1,200-seat Italianate building opened in the 1920s, the dawn of Los Angeles’ ascension as an entertainment capital. In 2001, Perry booked a three-night run of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, an event designed to bring out the kingmakers—producers, executives, lawyers and monied benefactors—who could make him a star. The show sold out, but the seats weren’t filled with power brokers, just locals and some assistants sent to see what all the fuss was about.

“I couldn’t walk down the street without people screaming, ‘Madea, Tyler, Madea!’ ” Perry says, recalling his days on the road. “And then I got to Hollywood, and they had no clue. No clue to what I’d done, who I was or the following I had.”

One of the assistants who had seen the show worked for Chuck Lorre, the acclaimed showrunner high on the success of hits Grace Under Fire, Cybill and Dharma & Greg. After hearing about the play, he decided he’d try to pitch a sitcom built around Perry.

The networks wouldn’t bite, though, so Lorre moved on to Two and a Half Men, the Charlie Sheen show that became a breakout hit for CBS. OCTOBER 2020

1, when he was quisite inspirabackstage they infrey, who by pany that proalready begin“writing your

rhaps most imfirst film or TV n from theater andise and colperformances.

TYLER PERRY STUDIOS

he Wilshire Ebanate building n of Los Angement capital. In ight run of Died to bring out rs and monied show sold out, just locals and as about. people screaming his days on ey had no clue. owing I had.” ow worked for

N N I N G NEVER GET A MOST RU ENTERTAINERS RFOR S TYLER N U M B RS SHOT AT OWNERSHIP. MOST NEVER GET A SHOT PERRY, ITENTERTAINERS WAS A STARTING POINT, WITH AT OWNERSHIP.RESISTANCE FOR TYLER PERRY, IT HOLLYWOOD’S FUELING WAS A STARTING POINT, WITH HOLLYWOOD’S A BILLION-DOLLAR EMPIRE. HERE’S A RESISTANCE FUELING A BILLIONDOLLAR EMPIRE. HERE’S A BREAKDOWN BREAKDOWN OF HIS FORTUNE.

119

OF HIS FORTUNE.

Cash and investments

Stake in BET+

$300 MIL

$60 MIL

Homes and toys

$320 MIL

Library

$40 MIL

Studio on 330 acres

$280 MIL “There was about a 10-year period where everything went on a deep lull and there was nothing made Chuck Lorre, the acclaimed showrunner high onbeing the sucfor people of color,” Perry says.

So he retreated to cess of hits Grace Under Fire, Cybill and Dharma & Greg.

After hearing about play, he decided pitch Atlanta, where hethe continued workinghe’d on try his to stage plays a and sitcom builtscript. around Perry.

The networks wouldn’t bite, a film But he couldn’t stop thinking about though, so Lorre moved on to Two and a Half Men, the television. A recipe for syndication he remembered Charlie Sheen show that became a breakout hit for CBS. from sneaking into thoseperiod sessions at the broadcasters’ “There was about a 10-year where everything went on a deep lull and there nothing being made for peoconvention stuck withwas him: 100 episodes, a loyal ple of color,”and Perry says. Sodistributor. he retreated to Atlanta, where audience a willing he continued working on his stage plays and a film script.

“The ignorance I had about Hollywood was so But he couldn’t stop thinking about television. A recipe for wonderful, back from on it,” he says. syndication helooking remembered sneaking into those sesrented a warehouse behindstuck a strip club in100 south sionsHe at the broadcasters’ convention with him: episodes, loyalturned audience and aawilling distributor.

Atlanta aand it into soundstage, investing in the “The ignorance I had about Hollywood was so wonderful, tools of the trade he knew little about—lights, booms, looking back on it,” he says. mics, set decorations—and He focused He rented a warehouse behindbegan a stripshooting. club in south Aton scenes of a itmultigenerational Black family lanta and turned into a soundstage, investing in theliving tools oftogether the tradeinheAtlanta, knew little mics, set theabout—lights, origins of hisbooms, first sitcom. decorations—and began shooting.

Hetwo focused on scenes of A break came in 2006, when struggling a multigenerational Black family living together in Atlanta, broadcast networks, UPN and WB, merged to create the origins of his first sitcom. aAnew one called CW.when Thetwo new networkbroadcast needednetbreak came in 2006, struggling works, UPNand andPerry WB, merged create a new one CW. content, had it.toHe went back tocalled Hollywood,

THE PROFILE

finally get him o this,” says Arwo decades. strong followe churchgoing their burdens one give them character, Maad wig, a large her homespun ing a must-see oosely defined es nationwide. ver really took yself a person frey says. “But not just moved

RUNNING THE NUMBERS

FORBES.COM

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91 THE PROFILE

enable him to ut of his car on orking out the e designed the ; he even sold

this time armed with 10 full episodes of television shot, paid for and ready to air. CW bought it and aired it as House of Payne, which pulled in ratings wildly above expectations. Executives at the much larger TBS network took note. Before Perry had filmed another scene, he landed a guarantee that TBS would air at least 90 new episodes of his show that he would own outright. The network offered $200 million to get him away from CW, pure gold for such cheap productions—“primetime programming on a soap opera budget,” as one top agent calls it—that spent nothing on writers, directors, producers or showrunners. Perry pocketed a huge haul: an estimated $138 million.

“It was so out of the box, such a different paradigm,” says entertainment lawyer Dan Black, who says Perry’s deal is still referenced in negotiations today. “You can get meaningful fees and meaningful back-end, but if you own the content, that’s very, very impressive and not an easy thing to do.”

Though he was clearly drawing huge crowds, the overwhelmingly white Hollywood executive set still didn’t quite get it. Perry’s attempt to rework Diary for film yielded little more than suggestions for rewrites and plot turns that would be more palatable for “mainstream” audiences. “ ‘Black people who go to church don’t go to the movies,’ ” Perry recalls one executive telling him at the time. “I came from a place where Black people had already embraced me and loved me. I was completely happy there, and still am.”

So he forged opportunity out of others’ ignorance.

He made Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer a proposal: He would put up half the money, collect half the profits and keep control of the content. The studio held the right to deduct all marketing costs from his cut, which Perry knew would be minimal, considering his following, as well as another 12.5% in distribution costs. The sweetener: Perry would eventually own it all outright. “ ‘What do you want [Diary] to do?’ ” Perry recalls asking.

“Well, if it makes us $20 million I’ll be very, very happy,” Feltheimer replied, referring to its lifetime box-office haul.

“I said, ‘OK, great—$20 million the first weekend?’ ” Diary, which cost $5.5 million to make, grossed $51 million in theaters and has since brought in an additional $150 million in video rentals, on- demand viewing, DVD sales and TV licensing.

While most of Hollywood shrugged off the movie’s success as a fluke, Perry and Lions­gate began pumping

Trade Talk Perry is known to shutter himself at his Wyoming hideout for six weeks, returning with three seasons’ worth of TV. Here he gives notes to Kathy Bates for the 2008 film The Family That Preys.

out Madea movies—11 of them over 14 years, all made on speedy production schedules and minimal budgets.

By the time Perry decided to retire the franchise in 2019, it had grossed more than $670 million at the box office and netted him about $290 million in fees and profits, Forbes estimates.

That’s all now starting to come home, as those Lionsgate titles begin reverting to his control. With the help of financial adviser John Cary at Atlanta’s NextGen Capital, Perry is starting to exploit the films more aggressively overseas, with early success in South Africa, South America and parts of Europe, all while continuing to self-finance hundreds of new TV episodes and at least one new feature film every year.

Revenge On Rebel Soil

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oetically, Tyler Perry Studios, America’s most prolific production venue for entertainment for Black audiences, was once a Confederate military stronghold. Renamed Fort McPherson, the army base was used to house prisoners during the Spanish-American War and World War I. Its historic brick homes and structures have hosted luminaries including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Colin Powell, and its rutted 18-hole golf course, Perry says, once rivaled Augusta. The challenge for Perry, who once

F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

lived in a car he parked nearby, is to make it the setting for the denouement of his Horatio Alger narrative.

From the outside, it’s a hard piece of real estate to be excited about, bordered on the north by a long stretch of barbed wire, to the east by a mile-long stretch of train tracks and to the south by the din of State Highway 154.

It’s sandwiched between two neighborhoods that have seen better days, with rows of middle-class houses, some spiffed up with bright landscaping, most with faded paint and chipped siding. More than a few are littered with old mattresses left to the elements.

Inside the gates, though, is a paradise no one enjoys more than Perry. During a visit last fall, he zipped around in a Polaris Ranger to the new soundstages he opened and christened with the names of showbiz legends including Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee, Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington. As he drove, he called out the highlights—a strip mall, a yacht, an empty soundstage, a house fronted by four façades—and then, after rumbling over the abandoned golf course, gestured toward his favorite new purchase: a replica White House.

“I own the lights. I own the sets,” Perry says, before settling into a couch in his office on the top floor of a modern, renovated four-story structure he calls the Dream Building. “So that’s where the difference is.

Because I own everything, my returns are higher.”

He paid $30 million for the property in 2015 and has OCTOBER 2020

COURTESY TYLER PERRY

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“THE FACT THAT I AM HERE ON CONFEDERATE LAND, AND THAT HUNDREDS OF BLACK AND BROWN PEOPLE COME HERE TO MAKE A LIVING, THAT IS EFFECTING CHANGE.” When it came to the fading army base, Atlanta was in need of a development partner who might inspire commercial activity that could help revitalize the otherwise forgotten section of the city’s southern edges. Perry had an in—not only via his rapport with President Obama, who at the time could have nixed any deal for the military land—but through his history of offering jobs to local crews.

His timing couldn’t have been better. In 2008, the Georgia Film Office had piled on tax incentives for production companies, and Perry made his purchase amid the streaming revolution, which triggered an arms race for content that has spurred a boom in demand for soundstages.

Even during the pandemic, he’s keeping it all humming. With Madea retired and an exclusive deal with Winfrey’s OWN network expired, Perry set his sights last year on BET, which has been struggling F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

for direction and has now practically built the BET+ streaming service around him. The network will pay Perry $150 million annually to produce a minimum of 90 episodes of new TV each year until 2025. BET, its streaming service—which hit a million subscribers in August—and other Viacom properties get exclusive rights to air those shows for five years, as well as the reruns of his House of Payne, Meet the Browns and For Better or Worse, plus some of his early stage work, which Cary is beginning to exploit. After that half-decade, the rights to all those BET-funded shows revert to Perry. The first two—The Oval and Sistas— became BET’s two top-rated programs in their first seasons.

The best part? “I don’t have a noncompete,” Perry says, which means still more projects, such as A Fall From Grace, which debuted in January on Netflix to terrible reviews—and 26 million streams in its first week. He also plans to start financing productions from other Black creators whom Hollywood has overlooked.

Fueled by those Georgia tax breaks, meanwhile, others are on hand to soak up extra capacity as well.

Perry has rented studio space to major productions including Walt Disney’s Black Panther, the Will Smith sequel Bad Boys for Life and TV’s The Walking Dead.

Last year Disney, Warner Bros. and other major studios, as well as new entrants like Netflix, Amazon and Apple, spent a combined $100 billion on original content, according to Frank Patterson, CEO of Pinewood Atlanta Studios, a rival lot 20 miles to the south.

With his studio humming, Perry is taking a page from Disney and Universal for lot development, with plans to build restaurants, shops and an entertainment complex with a theater and a theme park–like experience. Think Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, but with the feel of a down-home Southern kitchen. Perry admits that such a venture will take him outside of his comfort zone in terms of scope, control—and debt, since his business has always been, extraordinarily, a self-financed, all-cash operation. His plans also include housing for trafficked women and LGBTQ youth, and an academy to teach kids who grew up like he did the things he never learned—financial literacy, for one.

The risk, though, is worth it. “I can go outside and take this dirt and put it on my hands and know that there were Confederate soldiers here walking this land, plotting and planning everything they could to keep us Negroes in place,” Perry says. “The very fact that I am here on this land, the very fact that hundreds of people—Black and brown people—come here to make a living, that is effecting change.”

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93 THE PROFILE

since spent $250 million building a studio operation that’s now more than twice the size of the storied Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California—all of it paid for with the cash he’s brought in churning out movies and television programming for the past 15 years. The acquisition was a masterstroke, giving him a place to build a top-tier movie facility in a state that aggressively courts Hollywood productions, as well as a huge swath of land smack in the middle of one of Atlanta’s red-hot economic Opportunity Zones.

“I love land the way some women love shoes,” says Winfrey, one of the few people to see the property when Perry was considering making an offer. “I said ‘If you don’t take it, I will.’ It was astounding to me. I am officially in awe.”

In truth, it was a deal that perhaps only Perry could have made. He’s been operating out of Atlanta since he released Diary in 2005; in the ensuing 15 years he has produced at least one feature film every year, as well as 13 more television series, nearly all of it filmed in and around the city.

• FORBES LIFE •

By Fouzia Azzab

Jordan is world-famous for captivating visitors with its vibrant cities, modern culture, and ancient monuments.

On June 20, Jordan launched the second phase of its “Our Jordan is paradise” (Urdunna Janna) program, which was scheduled to be launched in the spring, but got delayed due the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supported by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and Jordan’s Tourism Board, the program covers up to 40% of the cost of 60 experiences across Jordan’s most-treasured destinations for Jordanian citizens, and up to 20% for Arab nationals.

The first phase of the program included 23 destinations in Jordan’s southern region, while the second phase has expanded to 37 destinations in the northern and central region, according to Majd Shweikeh, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities.

The tourism sector contributes 12.4% to Jordan’s GDP, and supports F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

more than 55,000 jobs. Last year, the number of visitors to Jordan’s historical sites reached 3.8 million, while the country’s income from tourism reached $5.8 billion, up 10.2 % from 2018, according to figures from Jordan’s Central Bank.

I Petra: One of the new seven wonders of the world

This ancient city is one of the most significant tourist attractions in the country. Carved into the rocks by the Nabataeans more than 1,000 years ago, for many it is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about Jordan, and as such is one of the most valuable national treasures in the country. Petra is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and is known as one of the new seven wonders of the world.

Petra was discovered in 1812 by

the Swiss orientalist Johann Ludwig Berckhardt. It is famous for being half-built, half-carved into the pinkish rock. It contains a mixture of ancient architectural arts belonging to various civilizations.

I Wadi Rum: The valley of the Moon

The Wadi Rum region is still home to Bedouin tribes, which represent the valley’s original inhabitants. The Nabataeans had lived there since ancient times. Visitors can enjoy its golden sands and soak in the vast landscapes along the horizon.

The Wadi was used as a location for several movies, including Lawrence of Arabia. Hollywood has also used it to shoot scenes for movies set on Mars, because of its steep mountains and vast plains.

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TarasikJO / Shutterstock.com

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Our Jordan Is Paradise: Top Tourist Destinations

I Amman: The city of contrasts

I Umm Al Jimal:

An Arabian oasis

This ancient city is 86km from the capital of Amman. It is known as the “Black Oasis” due to the presence of large numbers of black volcanic stones. The history of this city goes back to the Roman-Byzantine era, and it is characterized by its water pools and tubs designed for private use.

Today, it has become an important landmark in Jordan, with its ancient houses and churches, the Nabatean temple, and the remains of Roman ruins. Historically, Umm al-Jimal was known as the junction of the roads linking Palestine and Jordan with Syria and Iraq.

I The Dead Sea: Ganna Glushakova / Shutterstock.com

A natural marvel

The warmth of the Dead Sea is known for its relaxing qualities, in addition to its extreme salinity, containing up to ten times more salt than other sea water. It contains various mineral salts such as magnesium, sodium, potassium, and bromine. Visitors can also enjoy the healing mud, and float on the sea’s surface.

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Amman is the vibrant heart of the country, with a unique blend of various commercial trades, contemporary buildings and hotels, innovative restaurants, art galleries and boutiques, along with traditional cafés and small artisan workshops.

Known as a fascinating city of contrasts, Amman brings together the old and the new.

The city is situated on a relatively high area between the desert and the fertile Jordan Valley. The heart of the city embraces the Amman neighborhoods sprawling on the foothills of the mountains, where you can find the active and vibrant downtown area, as well as Jabal Al Lweibdeh—famous for its art exhibitions and manifestations of cultural life. It is also home to Al Abdali, a trendy shopping district.

Jerash

I Wadi Mujib:

I Umm Qais:

The Wadi Mujib is the lowest nature reserve in the world, located in the deep Mujib Valley near the east coast of the Dead Sea at 410 meters below sea level.

The reserve extends to the Kerak and Madaba mountains to the north and south, reaching 900 meters above sea level in some places.

A unique place and home to a vast biodiversity that includes 300 species of plants and about 150 species of birds and wildlife, the mountain area provides living places for many endangered animals and plants, in addition to being a distinctive eco-tourism area. Many tourists visit these mountains for walking and swimming in the Mujib River, climbing rocks and sliding down waterfalls.

Umm Qais is a town in northern Jordan that used to be known by the name of ancient Gadara. Climbing its hills, visitors can enjoy the panoramic views of the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights. Historically, Gadara was renowned as a cultural center. It was the home of several classical poets and philosophers, including Theodorus, founder of a rhetoric school in Rome.

Umm Qais will take you on a journey through different times through its markets and military parades. One of the city’s most significant mysteries—a network of tunnels extending across hundreds of kilometers under the ground— connected Gedara with 10 cities.

A biosphere reserve

I Jerash: A meeting place

A cultural center

of civilizations

I Madaba: The city of mosaics

Jerash has been a meeting place for Roman, Greek and Eastern civilizations, creating a city with a unique historical character. Spring is the most perfect time of the year to visit, as its green-covered hills attract many hikers as well as tourists.

The city also hosts the Jerash Festival for Culture and Arts, which transforms the city for three weeks of local folklore dancing, music, and theater performances.

It is also a popular destination for domestic tourism during the summer, due to its cooler weather compared to the rest of Jordan.

This city is characterized by scenes of rural life alongside religious tourism attractions. Madaba is rich with Byzantine and Umayyad mosaics, which are still produced locally today.

The famous hilltop fortress of Mukawar “Machaerus”—also known as the castle of Herod the Great—is located an hour from the city. South of Madaba, the Ma’in Hot Springs— also known as “Hammamat Ma’in”— boast a series of hot waterfalls and mineral springs, attracting visitors seeking medical tourism.

OCTOBER 2020

• THOUGHTS ON •

Perseverance “Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”

— Pele

John D. Rockefeller

“No one succeeds without effort... Those who succeed owe their success to perseverance.”

— Ramana Maharshi

“I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance.

It overcomes almost everything, even nature.”

— John D. Rockefeller

“God is with those who patiently persevere.”

— Arabian Proverb “It is not necessary to hope in order to act, nor to succeed in order to persevere.”

— William of Orange

“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”

— George Eliot “Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.”

— Marie Curie “Just remember, you can do anything you set your mind to, but it takes action, perseverance, and facing your fears.”

— Gillian Anderson “Perseverance and audacity generally win.”

— Dorothée Luzy F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

“Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.”

— Samuel Johnson

FINAL THOUGHT George Eliot

“The path from dreams to success does exist. May you have the vision to find it, the courage to get on to it, and the perseverance to follow it.”

— Kalpana Chawla

Kalpana Chawla

“The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful.

Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.”

— Eric Ries

“In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm, in the real world, all rests on perseverance.”

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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images from wikipedia.org

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OCTOBER 2020

A SAFE Journey & ENJOYABLE

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Nile Air

Pax And Cargo Team

Welcome You Back On Board www.nileair.com F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.CO M

OCTOBER 2020