Ramy Assaf and the unfinished business of a conversation

A hat can be photographed, admired and discussed without ever being sold. Around 2016, Ramy Assaf watched his wife encounter that small but consequential problem. She had started selling hats on Instagram. Customers could reach her through direct messages or WhatsApp. The conversation was easy to begin; collecting the money and keeping track of the order were another matter. An audience had arrived before the machinery of a shop.

Assaf was working in venture capital at Middle East Venture Partners. In his wife's business, he could see a problem at a scale that a presentation might miss: one merchant, one interested customer, one awkward next step. Social platforms had made it possible to open a shop window almost instantly. The less photogenic work of taking payments and managing customers still demanded separate arrangements. The hat was doing its job. The checkout needed help.

He and Ashraf Atia co-founded Zbooni in 2016; its mobile app launched in 2017. The name means 'my customer' in Arabic. There is a useful editorial discipline in that name. It keeps attention on the person at the other end of a sale, even when the conversation around technology threatens to become a parade of acronyms. Assaf's starting point was an existing business trying to complete an existing order.

Before the hats, a suitcase

Assaf had already tried building software around the way people helped one another. In 2013, he was a co-founder of Friendshippr, which let people coordinate deliveries through friends' travel plans. A Facebook connection could become the person who brought something across a border. The proposition depended on relationships that already existed, with an app supplying some organization.

His founding anecdote was cheerfully unglamorous. Living in Dubai, he wanted a particular Old Spice deodorant from the United States. Friends and family traveling from there could bring it, provided he could work out who was coming next. Few pitch decks open with a bathroom cabinet. This one had the advantage of being attached to an actual inconvenience.

Friendshippr raised $670,000 from angel investors. Its team included Mohamed Hamedi, Ali Hamidi and designer Kaysar Ridha; Assaf had previously worked on digital market development at Laimoon and was a minority partner at Honeybee Tech Ventures. The company considered how to notify friends without making a request feel like an obligation. Even in a shipping app, the manners of the exchange mattered.

One encounter placed Assaf in the back of an Uber van with David Marcus, then PayPal's president. Friendshippr had been selected for a PayPal and Uber pitching initiative at LeWeb. Marcus offered feedback on making the product easier to use. The setting was apt: a business about journeys, discussed during one. Assaf's advice that year was to commit to a single project. Asked about his next venture, he answered, 'Hey one thing at a time'.

A payment mistaken for a bug

The early Zbooni story contains a pleasing reversal. In a 2019 interview, Assaf recalled a first transaction of about $1,500. It was larger than the team expected, and the chief technology officer initially suspected something was wrong. A working product had produced an event that looked like a malfunction. The customer had beaten the team's expectations to the checkout.

Finding more customers required work considerably less theatrical than a pitch in a van. The team manually identified Instagram sellers, looking for businesses whose profiles directed buyers to WhatsApp rather than to an e-commerce site. Assaf described a list built one account at a time and messages tested one merchant at a time. They were searching for the people already conducting commerce in conversation.

The response taught them which part of their offer mattered most. Among the features they could talk about, payment collection was the problem that resonated. That is an unusually practical form of market research: a merchant either recognizes the inconvenience or keeps scrolling. A beautifully named feature has limited powers against a customer who simply wants to be paid.

The arrangement made room for two different experiences. Merchants used the app to manage products, orders and invoices. Buyers could follow a checkout link in a browser. The buyer did not have to download another app merely to finish the purchase. A conversation could therefore retain its familiar setting while the transaction acquired a more orderly ending.

A runway, then a wider map

By 2019, Zbooni was testing that logic in a setting where conversation and commerce naturally mingle: fashion. Fashion Forward Dubai selected it to support a shop-now feature at the event in Dubai Design District. Designers could send a virtual checkout through WhatsApp, taking orders as they showed collections. The interval between seeing something and being able to buy it became a product problem worth solving.

For an independent designer, this carries a particular appeal. A collection may invite questions that a product page cannot anticipate. A buyer might want to understand the item before committing. The sales conversation can do that work, but someone still needs to capture the order. Assaf's technology was being tried where the clothes, their makers and potential customers were gathered together.

In September 2021, Zbooni closed a $9.5 million Series A round, following an initial $5 million tranche. Investors included March Holding, Enterprise Fund and Chalhoub Group through its investment arm. The intended uses were concrete: hire people, develop the technology and expand the customer base. Funding gave the team more capacity to work on an idea already being used by merchants.

Egypt brought another version of the same problem and another set of relationships. Zbooni worked with JumiaPay to integrate payment gateway capabilities as it entered the market. In 2022, its Egypt regional director described a team spread across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. The map was widening, while the transaction at its center remained recognizable: a business needed a practical way to take an order and receive payment.

Learning to listen at a larger scale

The founder's job also changed as the product developed. Helping a merchant collect money is an immediate intervention. Understanding what that merchant needs next requires a longer conversation. Zbooni's June 2021 survey polled more than 200 merchants using its platform. Half operated only online; half had a physical retail presence. That split gave its research a view of businesses on both sides of a shop door.

Assaf's introduction to the survey described understanding businesses as a condition of helping them. There is nothing especially glamorous about a questionnaire. Its value lies in preventing the company from substituting its own assumptions for customers' plans. A merchant who operates a physical store may want digital tools for reasons quite different from someone who began with an Instagram account.

In 2023, Zbooni introduced cShop, a marketplace for UAE brands. The launch brought together 50 local companies and allowed shoppers to discover listings before chatting directly with the businesses. For Assaf, this extended the work from completing sales to helping merchants meet potential buyers. Bespoke products and services could have a place in that model because a conversation could precede the purchase.

The 2024 MENA cCommerce Report explored the relationship further, using a commissioned YouGov survey alongside discussion of WhatsApp, customer expectations and automated interactions. In its foreword, Assaf argued that businesses would still need to relate to people as individuals as AI became more prevalent. His interest in the tools remained tied to the quality of the exchange they enabled. A message can be delivered instantly and still fail to answer the question.

What the numbers can tell you

By December 2024, Zbooni had 12,000 merchants using the platform and had served more than 500,000 end-customers across four countries. It processed 700,000 transactions worth $150 million during 2024. Those figures describe several different things: the businesses using the tools, the people buying through them, the number of purchases and the money passing through. They should remain separate. Transaction value is money processed, not company revenue.

Zbooni appeared at number 47 in the Middle East's Fintech 50 for 2025. Recognition is a convenient signpost in a founder's story, but the more revealing development is the distance between the original problem and the number of people now encountering its solution. A tool prompted by one small business had become infrastructure used across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

In September 2026, Zbooni Jordan announced a partnership with Valu Jordan to add buy now, pay later as a payment option, subject to Valu's approved credit limits. The announcement described more than 1,000 merchants on Zbooni's Jordan platform. General manager Ahmad Fakhreddin framed the work around reducing complexity for smaller businesses. The expansion continued through local operators and partnerships, with the founder's original concern still visible in the product.

The customer gets the last word

Assaf's earlier venture capital work gave him exposure to many founders and business plans. He has also described discomfort with the investor's responsibility to decide which ideas deserved backing. 'I hated that part,' he said. His preference was to operate a business and work directly on problems. That distinction helps explain why a small merchant's difficulty could occupy more of his attention than a fashionable market thesis.

His public advice invites experimentation and accepts that testing may be embarrassing. It also places customers' judgments ahead of investors' opinions. The principle is easy to applaud and harder to practice. A founder must be willing to hear that the feature attracting attention in a meeting may be less useful than the dull little function that makes an invoice easier to send.

“I hated that part.”

Ramy Assaf, on judging business ideas in venture capital

There is a line running through these projects: people had already found ways to trade, travel and help each other, and Assaf tried to make the arrangements easier to manage. The software entered after the behavior. That reading of his work is more useful than treating every new product as a sudden invention of human nature.

The hats remain a good place to end because they keep the scale honest. Before there were regional offices, transaction counts and funding rounds, there was a seller answering messages. Her customer could see what she made and ask about buying it. Assaf's work began with the unfinished part of that conversation. Years later, the question is still wonderfully ordinary: can the business actually complete the sale?