Mounir Nakhla and the economics of a three-wheeled idea

Mounir Nakhla remembers the first month in unusually precise terms: 64 tuk-tuks. Twenty-seven in Shubra El Kheima, 37 in Hawamdiya. It was March 2010. Long before the billion-dollar valuation, before the acquisitions abroad and the stock-market paperwork, there were three wheels, a borrower and a question about whether the vehicle could pay its own way.

The answer shaped his career. A tuk-tuk was affordable relative to other vehicles, useful on narrow streets and capable of generating income. Financing one meant helping someone acquire the means to work. Nakhla saw a commercial proposition in customers whom other lenders regarded with suspicion. His recollection of those first sales still has the specificity of a shopkeeper counting the day's receipts.

Today he is the founder and CEO of MNT-Halan, with operations spanning Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. The distance between those two descriptions is considerable. His route across it includes agricultural trading, microfinance, an Indonesian inspiration and a ride-hailing business whose growth eventually became an uncomfortable question. The interesting part is how often he changed direction while continuing to serve a similar customer.

A jeweller’s son, a borrower’s education

Work was visible at home. His family made jewellery; designs, drawings and business papers were part of the household scenery. Nakhla has described learning discipline and respect for money from his father. There is something pleasingly literal about that education: when a parent works with valuable materials, carelessness has a price tag.

His formal education took him into international business at the European Business School and then environment and development at the London School of Economics. The pairing makes sense in retrospect. One discipline considers how enterprises operate; the other asks what their activity changes for people. His career would bring the two questions into the same loan application.

Early professional experience came at Environmental Quality International, where he held several roles and became managing partner in 2008. His uncle, Mounir Neamatalla, worked in development and microfinance. That family connection gave him a way into a field that would become a business rather than remain an academic interest.

There were less polished enterprises along the way. Working with friends, he supplied wheat to the Egyptian government. He also financed strawberry growers and sold their output to jam factories. For that venture, he borrowed money from his father and later repaid it. A family loan came with a family reminder that it was still a loan. The future lender had some practice on the other side of the agreement.

The engine was also the collateral

Mashroey, his vehicle-financing business, began taking shape in 2009 and started selling on credit in 2010. The connection with GB Auto mattered: here was an automotive distributor with a product people wanted, but whose prospective customers needed a way to pay for it. Nakhla's task was to connect demand with financing.

A vehicle gave the arrangement a tangible anchor. It was an asset and an income-producing tool. That did not remove credit risk, but it gave him a reason to investigate borrowers more closely. A customer's ability to earn mattered to the decision. Three wheels could carry a passenger; they could also carry a repayment plan.

He later built Tasaheel, established in 2015, extending financing to small and micro businesses. Vehicle purchases were only one use for credit. Working capital opened a wider field: enterprises needed funds to operate, buy stock and keep trading. His experience with owners and drivers had become a starting point for a broader financial business.

Women were central to that business. By 2024, Tasaheel had served 2.2 million customers, approximately 62 percent of them women. It operated in 25 Egyptian governorates through more than 700 branches. These are figures about a subsidiary at a particular moment, but they explain something essential about Nakhla's career: the network was already substantial before an app became its most visible expression.

An idea brought home from Jakarta

In early 2017, investor David Halpert arranged a meeting with Nadiem Makarim, the founder of Indonesia's Gojek. Nakhla already knew vehicles and their operators. Gojek showed him what software could do with that knowledge: connect customers and drivers, then build further services around their transactions.

“On the plane on the way back I made the decision to found Halan,” he recalled. It is a tidy founding scene, although the useful detail comes before the flight. He had a business and a network that made the Indonesian example intelligible. An app could give those relationships a different scale.

Halan began operating as a ride-hailing service in 2017, focused on motorcycles and tuk-tuks. Its name means “immediately” in Arabic. The transport was suited to villages and informal neighbourhoods where a car might be expensive or impractical. By June 2019, it had provided close to 20 million rides and attracted almost $8 million in investment.

Building it meant persuasion on the ground. Nakhla personally spoke to tuk-tuk drivers about joining. Finding a technology partner took effort too. Ahmed Mohsen became his co-founder and CTO. His combination of computer science, mathematics and security experience supplied skills the expanding venture needed. Software had entered the story, but friendship and conversations still did much of the work.

Three million rides, one awkward calculation

By 2019, Nakhla says, Halan was handling about three million rides a month while losing roughly $1 million a month. The two numbers belong together. Rapid customer activity could look encouraging on a presentation slide and still leave an expensive problem in the accounts.

He was considering a $15 million fundraising round. The prospect made him ask what would happen after the money was spent. Raising another round to continue the same pattern was a poor answer. The economics were stubborn: higher prices reduced rides; smaller incentives discouraged drivers. Growth depended on payments the business struggled to sustain.

Nakhla also had a lending operation that needed better technology. Redirecting Halan's engineering effort toward financial services offered a use for the team that fitted an existing business. The pivot required agreement between shareholders with different priorities, including investors accustomed to technology growth and those focused on a profitable lender.

That decision is the hinge of his story. He abandoned a visible service with substantial usage to pursue something he understood from years of lending. His willingness to reconsider the ride business complicates the usual founder portrait of unwavering conviction. Sometimes conviction involves conceding that the attractive chart is measuring the wrong thing.

The software behind the counter

In 2021, Halan combined with MNT Investments to form MNT-Halan. A $120 million financing round accompanied that phase. Development Partners International saw the opportunity to bring Nakhla's businesses into a single platform, connecting established lending operations with digital services.

The underlying software mattered as much as the consumer app. Nakhla has said the shift depended on 18 months spent developing proprietary core banking technology. Named Neuron, the system supports the financial products behind the screen. A customer sees an interface; the company must keep the machinery underneath coherent as products multiply.

Lending, payments, cards, investment services and e-commerce could now sit within the same financial relationship. Nakhla describes using customer data to understand different needs and develop services around them. That approach also gives the company reasons for customers to return beyond the original loan.

The branch network continued to matter. Physical distribution and software have different jobs, and MNT-Halan uses both. For someone whose first business involved a tangible vehicle and a known borrower, the combination is a natural extension. There is a long stretch of human activity between putting an app on a phone and making it useful enough to trust.

Learning to leave the file on somebody else’s desk

Nakhla's early management habits were intensely personal. He reviewed credit cases individually, selected branch locations and involved himself in marketing. He has described spending years micromanaging. The founder who knew how every detail worked also had to learn how the business could work without his attention to every detail.

His method was to turn recurring decisions into policies, then move to the next area. Experienced departments and a senior team freed him to spend more time on capital, acquisitions and new markets. Delegation emerged from making his judgment transferable, rather than merely telling himself to interfere less.

The people around him remain part of that process. He consults friends and family and has described his wife, Enjy, as an intuitive sounding board. With Mohsen, the working relationship developed into a friendship. There is an appealing modesty in a founder admitting that other people help him decide what to do. A large company gives an individual more opportunities to be wrong, and more colleagues to notice.

“Stick to principles.”Mounir Nakhla

Four countries, four different questions

International expansion put that organization to work. In 2024, MNT-Halan acquired Advans Pakistan Microfinance Bank and Turkey's Tam Finans. The latter brought a local commercial-finance business into the group. The UAE business followed, focusing on financial access for an underbanked expatriate workforce.

Nakhla's explanation of expansion is practical: credit is local, and licensing takes time. Acquiring an established operation can provide expertise and distribution that a distant headquarters cannot manufacture simply by translating an app. Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and the UAE each present a different customer problem.

Institutional capital supported the move. IFC invested in July 2024, with a disclosed commitment of $40 million. In June 2026, an investment round led by Al Ahly Capital, the National Bank of Egypt's investment arm, put MNT-Halan's valuation at $1.4 billion. The company said most proceeds would support Egypt, alongside regional expansion.

Then came another kind of audience: public-market investors. On October 7, 2026, subscriptions opened for the Egyptian business's IPO, offering 320 million existing shares at EGP 24.5 each. Trading was expected on October 20. At this profile's October 12 publication date, that remained a scheduled event. The offering concerns the Egyptian business, whose pricing implies a different valuation from the multinational parent.

A number worth remembering

Nakhla has been frank about wanting the business to keep growing. After reaching a billion-dollar valuation, he joked about pursuing a decacorn: “10 is a much nicer number than one.” The ambition is clear, and the joke has the advantage of making the vocabulary of venture capital sound faintly ridiculous. Large round numbers do invite that treatment.

Yet the details that make his story distinctive are smaller. A father who expected repayment. A jam factory that needed strawberries. Drivers who had to be persuaded in person. A co-founder whose skills complemented his own. Each belongs to a career built through transactions and relationships before those activities became an international platform.

The first 64 tuk-tuks remain a useful place to end. Their value lay in what owners could do with them, and that question has followed Nakhla through each version of his business. Software, foreign acquisitions and an IPO have changed the scale and the paperwork. The customer still needs something that works in daily life. For a founder now dealing in billions, remembering the first month's sales seems a sensible habit.