Nov 29, 2021

Yassir is happy to announce that it raised a $30M Series A funding round this summer. The funds were raised from a range of Investors including WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike (Stanford Alumni) ventures and Quiet Capital. Endeavor Catalyst (co-investment fund of Endeavor), FJ Labs, Venture Souq, Nellore Capital, Moving Capital (AKA the Uber Alumni Investment Club), and others also participated. Notable Angel Investors include Cleo Sham, former director of operations at Uber in Europe and China, Thomas Layton, chairman of Upwork and founder of Opentable and Metaweb, Rohan Monga, former COO of Gojek and Hannes Graah, former VP of Spotify and Revolut. Most existing investors also participated. 

Note that Yassir had previously raised $13.25M in a seed round which was undisclosed in which Y Combinator, the largest accelerator in the world that has seen the likes of AirBnB, Stripe, Dropbox, Doordash and others, participated. The seed round also included DN Capital, FJ Labs, Unpopular VC, P1 ventures, French Partners, Spike (Stanford Alumni) ventures, ACE & Company and Venture Souq, among others. Notable Angel investors included Max Mullen, Co-Founder of Instacart, Sizhao Yang, founder of Farmville, Alan Rutledge founder of TrendMD, Alber Ni, former head of engineering and recruiting at Dropbox, Samvit Ramadurgam, founder of Forge, Julian Shapiro, founder of Demand Curve, Greg Isenberg, founder of 5by and Islands, Cleo Sham, Rohan Monga and Hannes Graah, among others. 

Started in 2017, Yassir has rapidly grown into a trusted multi-sided marketplace in the Maghreb region (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) used by more than 3 million users, offering on-demand services such as ride hailing and last mile delivery, which generates revenues to more than 40,000 partners that include drivers, delivery riders, merchants, FMCGs and wholesalers with the ultimate goal to use such a marketplace to offer payment services to all the sides of the marketplace in a region where a large majority of people and merchants remain unbanked and/or seldomly use payment services.

Yassir Co-Founder, Noureddine Tayebi, commented on how this funding will allow the company to strategically invest in its growth. 

“First off all, I want to thank all our investors for their trust, partnership and support as well as believing in our mission. They have a great track record in supporting great entrepreneurs and ventures. We will be using the funds to (1) triple the size of our engineering team to meet our product ambitions, (2) consolidate our growth in the existing markets via current and new products, and (3) expand into new markets primarily in Sub-Saharan African countries but also into other strategic geographies.”

Anthony Saleh, partner at WndrCo said “Yassir is a natural evolution of companies seen elsewhere in the world. The moment we met the team we saw the opportunity of entering an enormous market with a service taking the best of models we have seen elsewhere. We’re thrilled to be part of this supercharged journey.” 

Noureddine, a Stanford PhD and a native of Algiers with more than 10 years of Silicon Valley corporate and entrepreneurial experiences, who returned to his native region also commented on the company mission.

“Yassir is not just a company to me. It was founded with a fourfold mission. First, we want to create a 100% local tech startup success model which will be emulated by others and more so Yassir team members. Second, we want to empower the local talent and more importantly the technical talent which often leaves the region, mainly to Europe, to pursue further studies or find jobs. We, in fact, hire engineering talent in each country we operate in to expand that mission. And finally we want to make the lives of our people easy. In fact, Yassir means easy in Arabic! Finally, we want to infuse social values via our products such as trust and mutual help.” 

Yassir has seen significant growth since its founding while running very lean by focusing on sound unit economics and by leveraging its knowledge of the region and its culture. 

Thomas Rubben, partner at DN Capital which is one of the early backers of Yassir mentioned “There is no one-size-fits-all approach to building consumer apps, they require local knowledge and customisation. That’s how Grab and Gojek have built such large businesses in South-East Asia. Yassir encapsulates this truth and has shown unparalleled hyper-growth to become the leading ride-hailing and delivery super-app in North Africa.” 

In July 2021, Noureddine joined the Endeavor network which is the largest entrepreneurial community that empowers high-impact entrepreneurs around the world. Six months later, Yassir was selected as an Endeavour Outlier, companies have achieved exceptional growth and impact. Walid Bellagha, Managing Director of Endeavor in the Maghreb region commented on the round 

“Since Noureddine was going through the Endeavor selection process, we had the conviction that Yassir was going to be an outstanding performer, but it really exceeded our expectations by joining the Endeavor Outliers group less than a year after selection, as one of the top performers globally. This round is now going to unleash Yassir’s potential event further!”

Endeavor Catalyst, the co-investment fund of Endeavor, which exclusively invests in Endeavor entrepreneur-led companies and which already backed 29 unicorns worldwide, also participated in the round. 

Yassir has already started its expansion into new markets primarily focusing on Western Africa as its next phase and will be launching these markets imminently.