francophone-africa
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Raphael Dana and the business hiding in an ordinary ride
A visit to Togo and Benin gave Raphael Dana a new use for what he had learned in Singapore. Gozem began with motorcycle taxis and grew into a business connecting transport, deliveries, vehicle financing and mobile money.
Gozem’s super app runs on a very ordinary thing: a motorcycle
A ride becomes a delivery. A driver becomes an owner. Across Francophone Africa, Gozem is connecting everyday errands to the expensive business of putting vehicles on the road.
Gregory Costamagna and the App That Learned to Ride
A decade in Southeast Asian e-commerce taught Gregory Costamagna to see platforms as layers. In Lomé, the first layer was a motorcycle ride - and the road from there led to deliveries, financed vehicles and a digital wallet.
Ismael Belkhayat Is Turning the Corner Shop Into a Financial Network
A delayed carton of milk exposed a much larger problem. Ismael Belkhayat and Sophia Alj built Chari around the daily friction of Morocco's neighborhood shops - then followed the transaction trail from stock orders to payments.
Noureddine Tayebi
Noureddine Tayebi is the founder and CEO of Yassir, North Africa's most valuable tech startup and the leading super app for francophone Africa. Born in Algiers in 1977, he earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University after completing a master's degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He spent eight years at Intel in Silicon Valley accumulating over 50 patents before founding InSense, a nano-motion sensor startup acquired by Mojo Vision in 2018. In 2017, he co-founded Yassir, which has grown to serve 8 million+ users across 45 cities in six countries, offering ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, and fintech services. Yassir has raised $193.25 million in total, including a historic $150M Series B led by Mary Meeker's BOND, cementing Tayebi's position as a defining figure in Africa's digital economy.
Yassir
Yassir is the leading super app for French-speaking Africa, bundling ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, and digital payments into a single platform serving more than eight million users across the Maghreb and beyond. Founded in 2017 by Stanford-trained engineer Noureddine Tayebi and El Mahdi Yettou, the company has raised over $193 million, including a record $150M Series B led by Bond.