Ahmed Rawi and the business of wanting more

The first customer wanted a wedding photo booth. Ahmed Rawi was nineteen, at college, and making electronic projects for events: devices that could greet a visitor or take a photograph when someone entered a booth. A student saw one of his creations and asked to rent it for her wedding. He had built something for the pleasure of building it. Someone else had supplied the business plan.

Rawi later recalled having little idea what he was doing. He had been experimenting with interactive electronics; now he had to deliver something for an occasion that mattered to another person. He took the challenge anyway and ran the business from nineteen to twenty. The student’s request had given him a business to pursue.

Today, the Bahraini entrepreneur, publicly known as Ahmed Al Rawi, is Calo’s co-founder and chief executive. His story runs through sports bookings, a year of exploration, meal subscriptions, and an expansion into Britain that eventually reversed. Across those different businesses, he has kept returning to an awkward question: how much of the opportunity is still being left on the table?

The photo booth soon felt restrictive. Rawi was watching software founders reach customers around the world while his own creation came with hardware to move and manage. He described feeling jealous. That admission gives his early ambition a useful human scale. Before the funding rounds, there was a young entrepreneur looking at someone else’s business and thinking it looked rather more interesting.

Football pitches, then a bigger field

Malaeb, the sports app he co-founded, launched in May 2016. It let players book pitches and arrange games, moving a familiar logistical nuisance onto a phone. By September, the founders said more than 5,000 players and enthusiasts in Bahrain had signed up. The app was nearing its thousandth booking, with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia next on their expansion list.

Rawi explained that users were recommending the service to friends who had also struggled to book a pitch. Marketing involved experiments with digital channels, but much of the traffic came through those recommendations. A useful product could recruit its own next customer. It was an early encounter with a mechanism that would remain central to his thinking: make an experience worth talking about.

By 2017, Malaeb had secured investment from Raed Ventures and reported $1 million in bookings over fifteen months. Rawi also had a mentor in Hasan Haidar of 500 Startups. Those details matter because this was a working business with backers and users. Moving beyond it meant looking past an opportunity that had already produced evidence of demand.

After about three years with the sports app, he concluded that the market was too small for what he wanted to build. He took a year to explore, starting in Silicon Valley and spending much of it in New York. The young founder who had envied software’s reach was now asking a more demanding question about the size of the problem itself.

The expensive art of choosing

In a later essay, Rawi compared choosing a business to deciding where to invest a million dollars that must last five years. People would research a financial investment carefully, he argued, yet often commit their working lives to an idea after remarkably little investigation. He included himself in the criticism. Experience had made him less impressed by immediate conviction.

That period of exploration was neither tidy nor comfortably financed. He wrote that he tested ideas people did not want and tried a field he discovered he disliked. He came close to running out of money and borrowed to extend his runway. The search had its own bill. Looking for a better problem did not excuse him from the ordinary arithmetic of paying for the search.

Calo launched in Bahrain in November 2019. The initial experiment cost $2,000. Moayed Almoayed joined the founding story, and the service developed around meals ordered through an app and delivered to customers. For Rawi, food offered a recurring, everyday problem with room for a much larger business. An experiment had become a direction.

The shift carried an irony. He had left a hardware business partly because of its physical limits; now he was building a company that depended on kitchens and delivery operations. Software still mattered, but somebody had to prepare the order and somebody had to get it to the door. The problem he chose required him to become interested in the parts that could not be downloaded.

A budget for being memorable

Rawi’s approach to service becomes unusually concrete in a public post about Calo’s customer experience team. Employees could issue credits, refunds, or gifts. A weekly “WOW budget” gave the team money to do something memorable for a customer. He encouraged longer, personal conversations. For a business organised around convenience, he was willing to spend time on the people buying it.

That policy makes an abstract preference legible. Calling a company customer-focused costs very little; letting the person answering a complaint spend money involves trust, discretion, and an actual expense. Rawi was describing authority placed close to the customer. The person who heard the problem could also act on it, without turning every small disappointment into a journey up the organisation chart.

Calo’s published workplace values include accepting feedback, humility, moving quickly, and empathy. They also treat “wow” as a verb. A verb is a good place for a company value to live: it suggests somebody must eventually do something. In Rawi’s account, service belongs to the product experience, right alongside the app and the order that arrives.

“Genuine customer support is the best marketing a company could have.”

Ahmed Al Rawi

The first delivery grows up

Saudi Arabia became the next major test. Khwarizmi Ventures helped the founding team arrange a kitchen acquisition in Riyadh before the launch. Its account includes a photograph of Rawi during the first Saudi delivery period in June 2021. Behind the cheerful founder in a Calo shirt was a less photogenic list of necessities: suppliers, kitchen capacity, local relationships, and delivery logistics.

The investor later reported that Calo delivered more than ten million meals during 2024. In December of that year, the company raised $25 million in a Series B led by Nuwa Capital. A $39 million extension followed in July 2025, led by AlJazira Capital. Together, the two rounds brought Series B funding to $64 million.

These figures record different things. The original $2,000 tested whether a proposition deserved to become a business. The later rounds supplied capital for a business already operating at scale. Ten million meals described work performed, order after order. Putting all three numbers on the same triumphant growth chart would flatten the story. Each marked a different question Rawi and his colleagues had to answer.

Britain, with a return ticket

In 2025, Calo entered Britain through Fresh Fitness Food and Detox Kitchen. Buying established operators offered teams, supply chains, and customer relationships that a new arrival would otherwise have to assemble. Rawi described a gradual integration that preserved local strengths while bringing in Calo’s technology and operating approach. The business had crossed a border; the learning had begun again.

He found British customers more likely to begin through the web, while Gulf customers leaned towards mobile apps. He also described a slower process of winning trust. These are small differences with large consequences for a founder who likes speed. A successful app in one market does not determine how people in another market will decide to buy.

In May 2026, Calo announced it was closing its UK operations and concentrating resources on its six GCC markets. UK general manager Caspar Rose said new orders and renewals would end on May 31, existing deliveries would continue through June 30, and outstanding credits would be refunded. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman remained the stated operating focus.

The reversal belongs in Rawi’s story alongside the funding. His earlier writing had argued for examining an idea with an open mind rather than treating it as destiny. Britain makes that principle harder and more interesting to contemplate. An ambitious company can spend money entering a market and still decide that its resources belong elsewhere. The return ticket is part of the journey.

Dragons, decisions, and tomorrow

Rawi’s personal writing supplies an unexpected rehearsal for entrepreneurship: an online role-playing game. In a 2019 essay, he recalled calculating whether fighting dragons or cutting yew logs earned more virtual currency, and weighing effort against reward. Later, business presented its own versions of those puzzles: direct sales, advertising, partnerships, and the skills needed to make each work.

The resemblance amused him. Both worlds contained money problems, skill gaps, and another level to reach. It also explains the language of his later essays, which often treat business as a contest requiring judgment and execution. The dragon had become a spreadsheet problem. Presumably it was less obliging about dropping treasure.

His decision process is more methodical than that appetite for progress might suggest. In 2018, he recommended writing down the problem and options, analysing strengths and weaknesses, and declaring one’s bias before seeking advice. Other people should challenge the favoured answer. The exercise asks ambition to sit still long enough to explain itself.

By August 2025, he was asking “why not tomorrow?” His proposed method was to list the reasons a decision could not happen immediately, turn those reasons into tasks, and estimate the time each would take. A vague delay becomes a schedule. He explicitly argued that urgency still requires doing the work well. Speed, in this account, has homework.

The question he keeps asking

Rawi has also publicly described advising and investing in early-stage founders. His essays press them to distinguish the business they want to build from the result they actually want in their lives. Income, freedom, and the ambition to build a large company require different choices. Naming the goal is part of choosing the work.

His own impatience is openly stated. In an essay on wasted potential, he wrote about being bothered when a product falls short of what its users want or a business leaves demand unserved. There is little room in that outlook for a victory lap. An accomplishment immediately introduces a fresh inventory of unfinished possibilities.

It is an exacting way to look at a company, and it has a practical test. Calo’s next chapter must turn those possibilities into orders customers choose to repeat, in the markets where it now focuses. Rawi began with a student asking to rent something he had made. Years, kitchens, and funding rounds later, the customer still gets a vote.