Sanad Yaghi and the problem at the counter

Sanad Yaghi ordered an ice cream from his local grocery shop in Dubai. He received a tomato. As substitutions go, it was nutritionally defensible and commercially unhelpful. A language barrier had turned a small purchase into a small puzzle: why did a shop close enough to serve its neighbourhood still lack a straightforward way to take an order online?

The episode became part of the origin story of Dukkantek, the company Yaghi started with Shadi Joulani and Ali Alsayegh in January 2021. Today it operates as DTEK.ai, with Yaghi as co-founder and CEO. Its work has moved from software for community shops toward computer vision, automated checkout and AI systems for business operations. The distance between those descriptions is considerable. The customer’s impatience is familiar.

A corner shop is a useful place to begin a technology story. There are products, prices, payments and people who would like to get on with their day. Any invention introduced at the counter eventually faces an unusually clear examination: does this make the transaction easier? A pleasing presentation buys very little credit when someone is waiting with a basket.

Before the counter, the capital

Yaghi came to the problem through finance. He earned a bachelor’s degree in finance at American University’s Kogod School of Business, then worked in venture capital in London at Mubadala and Aljal Capital. That put him on the funding side of the startup world before he became responsible for a company of his own.

Joulani was already a longstanding connection. The two were childhood friends, and both came from entrepreneurial families. Their eventual partnership therefore had a history before it had a product. Alongside Alsayegh, they would build a business around merchants whose daily work involved a rather different vocabulary from venture investing: stock, sales, invoices and the next customer.

There is an appealing change of scale here. Finance can describe whole markets in a few cells of a spreadsheet. Retail software has to accommodate individual transactions. The first perspective can help identify an opportunity; the second asks whether the opportunity survives contact with a working shop. Yaghi’s career crossed between the two, taking him from assessing businesses to building the machinery other businesses would use.

The shop had to work before it could go online

Dukkantek began with a practical package for traditional merchants. Its cloud point-of-sale software recorded transactions and sales, calculated VAT and profit margins, and produced reports. Inventory tools helped merchants follow stock and stock value. Online selling and payment options extended the same business beyond the physical till.

The connection between these pieces mattered. An online storefront is only useful if a merchant can fulfil what it offers. Linking inventory to sales gives the website a relationship with the shelves. A companion application also let merchants follow store activity, review transactions and monitor payment methods. The proposition was operational as well as commercial: keep track of the shop while opening another way to buy from it.

By 2022, the business had broadened beyond its grocery beginnings. Its merchants included clothing and electrical retailers, and its offerings covered store management, payments and e-commerce. That expansion suggests why the original incident was a useful starting point rather than a complete business plan. The wrong item arriving is visible to the buyer. The systems needed to get the right one there extend further back.

Yaghi also took the proposition into public conversations. In July 2022 he appeared on the Smashi Business Show to discuss Dukkantek’s beginnings, its competitive market and its plans. Another video interview, with PYMNTS, explored digital storefronts for smaller regional retailers. The recurring subject was access: giving existing merchants tools to participate in online commerce while continuing to run their stores.

The expensive education of spending carefully

The company’s early financing included a $5.2 million seed round, followed by a $10 million pre-Series A announced in August 2022. BECO Capital led the latter round, with Rocketship and Colle Capital among the participants. The stated uses included geographic expansion, improvements to the technology and recruitment. These were company financing rounds, rather than measures of Yaghi’s personal wealth.

His account of fundraising is more revealing than the headline sum. Dukkantek had bootstrapped its pre-seed period. In his telling, that forced attention onto resource allocation, sustainable growth and customer churn. Later investor conversations gave greater weight to margins and the company’s operating structure. Habits developed while money was scarce became useful when asking for more of it.

“Bootstrapping our pre-seed period was critical”

Sanad Yaghi, discussing Dukkantek’s early financing in 2022

There is nothing glamorous about churn. It is a short word for the uncomfortable possibility that customers can leave. Yet for a software business serving merchants, it connects the fundraising conversation directly to the shop floor. A merchant who keeps paying is making a recurring judgement about usefulness. Growth and retention belong in the same discussion, however much more photogenic growth may be.

Yaghi’s public response to the funding also credited the team and the investors who supported its execution. In a separate LinkedIn post about hiring, he described the value of understanding candidates during recruitment. Together, those comments show the subjects occupying an operating founder alongside product and capital: choosing people, building a team and making the work repeatable.

Growing enough to change direction

In January 2023, Yaghi and Joulani were selected as Endeavor Entrepreneurs. At that point, Endeavor described Dukkantek as serving more than 25,000 stores across six countries and reported annual recurring revenue growth of more than 700 percent between 2021 and 2022. Those figures belong to that period. They capture the scale of the earlier store-management business before the later emphasis on checkout.

The subsequent turn is the most interesting decision in Yaghi’s company story. BECO describes a business that had expanded its digital point-of-sale offering across seven markets, then pivoted toward customers’ need for self-checkout tills. In other words, the team changed its proposition after establishing a substantial operation. Growth had produced information as well as revenue.

That distinction gives the pivot its weight. A founder can become attached to the product that first persuaded customers and investors. Changing it requires another judgement about which customer problem deserves the company’s attention. Here, the focus moved toward what happens at the checkout itself, where a queue makes the cost of delay conspicuous to everyone involved.

A clock at the checkout

SWIFT, DTEK’s checkout product, uses computer vision to recognise grocery items. BECO’s product description gives an item-identification time below 200 milliseconds and a checkout time below 30 seconds. These are the investor’s stated product figures, not a universal promise about every store or every shopping basket. They make the intended benefit unusually easy to picture: less time between presenting the goods and finishing the purchase.

The current DTEK.ai website places automated checkout alongside AI agents, vision systems and decision intelligence. Its examples include reporting, operational monitoring and workflow automation. The company now describes a broader relationship between what a system can observe and what an organisation can do with that information. The counter remains part of the picture, with a wider set of operational tasks around it.

For Yaghi, this gives the original problem a new technical expression. Early software helped a merchant record and organise the business. Computer vision introduces another way for a system to recognise what is happening. The useful question remains concrete: which action becomes easier as a result? At a till, a customer supplies a fairly direct answer by completing the purchase and leaving.

Beyond the basket

Yaghi’s public work has also extended beyond retail. In February 2026, he moderated Mo Gawdat’s session at the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival, where he was identified as a co-founder of both DTEK.ai and emma.love. The discussion introduced Emma, an AI platform intended to support human relationships, and addressed responsibility in how AI products are designed and deployed.

The festival appearance adds a second setting to his work: a public conversation about how people interact with AI. His speaker biography similarly emphasises reliability, adoption and governance in real-world systems. These interests sit alongside the practical demands of retail technology, where a system must earn acceptance through repeated use.

Asked in 2022 what skill he had acquired while launching his startup, Yaghi chose “grit”. It is a compact answer for a career that has already involved switching sides of the funding table, building with a childhood friend and changing a growing company’s direction. His story began with a purchase going wrong. Its continuing question is pleasantly demanding: can the technology make the next ordinary exchange go right?