UAE Startup Power Sweeps Middle East

Amr Shady
Aingel
Published in
7 min readAug 19, 2019

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Our data science wizards have decided to extend their stay in the UAE, indulging their AI selves in more skydiving activities and exploring the city’s extraordinary man-made archipelagos — Palm Islands.

Luckily, our wizards’ daily shenanigans didn’t get in the way of the sourcing business, and right on time, they sent us an interesting batch of early-stage startups.

With plans to become the Middle East’s “Silicon Valley”, the UAE ranks 11 on the World Bank’s 2019 Ease of Doing Business List for providing aspiring startup founders with world-class services.

In this UAE Spotlight, we’ve got an entrepreneurial duo, previously from Foodpanda and Bain & Company, building the region’s biggest eyewear e-commerce. And former founders of Loyyal and Disperse.io teaming up with gourmet oyster farmer and East Coast Shellfish founder to build a B2B seafood marketplace.

Get ready for another round of early-stage Emirates magic!

Eyewa

Versatile Eyewear E-commerce

A one-stop online shop for all things optical, Eyewa provides prescription eyeglasses, contact lenses, color contact lenses and sunglasses. A play on both ‘eye’ and the word ‘aiwa’ which means yes in Arabic, the 2017 startup offers a large collection of medium and high-end brands at prices starting from US $50.

Eyewa has raised a total of US $8.8 million to date. They recently raised US $7.5 million in Series A from Wamda Capital, Equitrust and 500 Startups among others. Eyewa was also selected as one of the Top 100 Arab Startups by the World Economic Forum. The startup is soon to manufacture and launch its own line of fashion-forward eyewear products.

Founding Team

This team of two co-CEOs recently joined Endeavor’s global network of high-impact entrepreneurs. Mehdi Oudghiri has nearly a decade of experience in running e-commerce businesses, and Anass Boumediene has strategic managerial experience in MENA, Europe and North America.

Both suffering from eyesight problems and seeing there was a market gap in how eyewear in the region was addressed, building an optical-centered startup felt right to the duo.

As Middle East Managing Directors of Foodpanda, a leading global e-food ordering platform, both Mehdi and Anass grew the business multiple folds across four different brands (HungerStation, HelloFood, Otlob and 24h.ae) across six different countries in the MENA region, before it was acquired by Delivery Hero in 2016.

Mehdi and Anass both served as advisors to Delivery Hero and worked as consultants to Bain & Company. Leading many fronts together at the same time, it seems that Mehdi and Anass know they make magic working together! We guess the good old saying ‘a ship with two captains sink’ doesn’t apply here.

Mehdi was also Product Manager at Valeo Service, and he got his MBA from Stanford. Whereas Anass worked as an Investment Analyst at both Deutsche Bank and ACG Private Equity, and got his master’s in Management, Finance, and Economics from ESCP Europe.

On sharing his entrepreneurial journey with his co-founder, Mehdi told Wamda, “We’re both Moroccans, we’re both ex-consultants so we’re analytical but our personalities are very different. I’m more of an introvert, Anass is extroverted and I think that’s a great combination.”

Seafood Souq

Digitizing Sea Wealth

The UAE is the second highest seafood consuming country in the region. Making sure this market is properly allocated is Seafood Souq. The 2018 startup is an e-commerce B2B platform facilitating the seafood F&B supply chain. It promises to eliminate fraud by tackling the market’s hurdles, including lack of regulation, resource wastefulness, high pricing, and mislabeling.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, around 35 percent of harvested fish and seafood [worldwide] is either lost or wasted along the supply chain. Through their traceability, Seafood Souq are able to regulate product waste and quality of produce and let’s just say Poseidon would be proud!

Seafood Souq might also be flexing their stealth mode muscles. They state that their “secret sauce needs to stay secret for a little while longer.” We’re definitely eager to see what this eventually brings to light! But for now, we know they aim to grow from Dubai to the rest of the UAE and the GCC by 2020.

Founding Team

This is a team of longtime Dubai residents with varying experiences around tech and entrepreneurship. Sean Dennis, CEO, is an entrepreneur with a knack for blockchain. He was co-founder of Loyyal, a smart contract blockchain startup. He has been an EIR at Dubai Future Accelerators since 2017. He also mentored a group of blockchain startups at H-Farm, one of Europe’s largest fintech accelerators.

Sean told Arabian Business that one of the perks of working with his fellow co-founders is their previous multi-founding experience. “This isn’t our first time and we’re not going to this blind thinking that we’ll figure it out later.” He has a Master’s in Business Property Valuation & Law from Cass Business School in London. For a look into his mind, you can read his fascinating breakdown of the food scene in Dubai here.

Another co-founder who isn’t new to starting up is COO Denis Konoplev. Denis is former co-founder of Disperse.io, an AI construction startup that aids onsite productivity through computer vision and is successful enough to scale beyond the UK. Denis also scaled beyond his own space when he came to Dubai as Consultant in the very same Dubai Future Accelerators program where Sean was resident.

Moving toward co-founding Seafood Souq also came with perks for Denis, for his favorite thing about working there is the “great team where we all compete against the problem, not each other.” An LSE alumnus, he has an MS in Management of Information Systems and Digital Innovation.

A co-founder with waves and tides of different experiences, Ramie Murray (aka Mr. Oyster) primarily identifies himself as an Oyster Farmer — an occupation that has many points to speak for his track record. Ramie is also Founder and Managing Director of East Coast Shellfish, the company that made Dibba Bay Oysters, the first farm in the UAE growing local gourmet oysters in warm waters.

Dibba Bay Oysters is one of a kind as most seafood wealth is imported to Dubai. However, oysters have a special status of needing to be fresh. “We take them out of the water in the morning, and then in the afternoon they’re with the hotels, they’re with the chefs, they’re in the restaurant,” Ramie told The Associated Press.

Ramie previously co-founded the Oman-based renewable energy development company Mahd Energy. In his earlier days, he set up a design agency by the name of The Big Picture FZ, which specializes in property marketing. Ramie has a BS in Industrial and Product Design from London South Bank University. The world has truly been his oyster!

Last but not least, we have Chairman and Seafood Souq’s pillar of corporate governance, co-founder Fahim Al Qasimi. As Executive Chairman of the Department of Government Relations for the Emirate of Sharjah, Fahim helps draft socioeconomic development policies and establish cooperation with NGOs and international governments. In his letter as Chairman of Seafood Souq’s board, he emphasizes the board’s measures for ensuring values like accountability, value creation, and sustainability.

“If one day, we partner with listed companies, file for an IPO or get acquired by a global player,” Fahim writes, “we will have a governance culture that meets global standards. We will be valued on the same basis as global peers.”

In his dedication to governance, Fahim is also Partner at AQ&P, an independent advisory firm focused on corporate governance for SMEs and corporates. He was also a Member of the Board of Directors at Abu Dhabi Media, the official media arm running 18 brands across broadcast and digital media. *Fun fact*: their media production arm, Image Nation, produced films like The Help and Ghost Rider. Fahim earned his Master of Studies in International Relations from Cambridge.

With 50% of all UAE early-stage startups registered in Dubai, as we pinned in our last issue, looks like it’s onwards and upwards for the local startup scene in the UAE. We still don’t know where our data science wizards and their mystical crystal ball will land next, but we’re excited to find out! Until then, we bid you farewell.

How do we shortlist companies?

Aingel’s Sorcerer is designed to help you discover great startups early.

Here is how we do it in a nutshell. First, we use different sources and automated tools to detect new startups early. Then, we analyze and filter for startups that score high on our proprietary predictive algorithm. The algo was developed at NYU by Aingel’s co-founders.

Founding teams data include educational background, work history, startup experience and personality. We deduce character traits using AI from founders’ digital footprint. We also analyze aggregate team experience and composition.

The list above is further curated after analyzing types of startups to make sure they are VC-friendly. Startups do not pay to be listed.

This post is published after The Sorcerer is first sent to our subscribers fresh from the spellbook!

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Co-founder/CEO of AiNGEL Corp. Tech entrepreneur and data scientist using AI/ML developed at NYU to identify the next game-changing startups.