Interview with Noureddine TAYEBI, CEO and co-founder of Yassir

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Mobile payment solutions have been long waited in North Africa and it is about to change. Noureddine Tayebi, CEO and co-founder of Yassir tells us more about the company’s ambition to become the African’s preferred “app for everything”.

In 2017, Yassir started officially in Algeria, offering on-demand ride hailing services in a market where the need existed but where cultural specificities made it hard to believe that such a service would succeed. Yet, five years later Yassir’s growth has been impressive and the use of its service became contagious across the country and beyond. Today, Yassir has expanded its operations in Tunisia, Morocco, Canada and France, has recently announced a $30M series A, is opening in West Africa in February and is about to expand its services beyond food deliveries to mobile payments and banking.

Yassir’s last year’s $30M series A catched the eye and sounded like a one-time exception in the Algerian startup ecosystem, still nascent and lagging behind its neighbor countries in terms of maturity and access to finance. How did Yassir succeed where everyone else failed? One can start by questioning Yassir’s national identity though, starting with Noureddine, its founder:

Our story started in Algeria, the product was built in Algeria, with Algerian engineers and the biggest team is Algerian. Yet, culturally, it is important to me that my team feels part of a supranational entity. We want to offer on-demand services in Africa, as such, we are only one team delivering the same services to different customers around the globe. There is no such thing as “local” vs “international” in our company

Noureddine studied in Algeria, at Polytechnique, still one of the best engineering schools of the country and then, like many alumni from Polytechnique, he expatriated to the US where he pursued a PhD at Stanford University. From there he started a brilliant career at the Silicon Valley, among the most innovative companies and brilliant minds in the World. He worked at the R&D department of Intel (where everything started in the Valley), then started InSense, a creative platform for branded content production & optimization that was acquired a few years later. In 2017, Yassir was founded in Palo Alto. Noureddine’s experience, entrepreneurial culture, science of execution and network definitely played a determining role in the success of YASSIR. As such, even if it is obviously profitable for the ecosystem to count such successful ventures, it cannot be the reflection of a positive dynamic from within. Yassir is much more a multinational company than an Algerian startup. .

Of course, bureaucracy and access to funding are major barriers to the development of an ecosystem, but in my opinion, in Algeria and North Africa in general, we lack true entrepreneur profiles with the appropriate mindset, culture and experience. There is a nonsense myth created around entrepreneurship, where you just need to be young and have bright ideas. But if you look at the average entrepreneur profile in Silicon Valley, they are around 40 years old and have a strong experience in the ecosystem prior to launching their ventures

In every ecosystem around the world, one deciding factor is the willingness from successful entrepreneurs to give back, inspire and spread a culture that can ignite the spark in ecosystems that possess the necessary infrastructure to allow a positive dynamic. Egypt’s fawry is a perfect example, through its investments in 7 startups  and general support to the ecosystem, and Yassir follows the path.

We see ourselves as a mission more than a company. This mission has a strong echo in the ecosystems we operate in, on two scales.

If the impact of Yassir on the brain drain or the ecosystem dynamism is difficult to apprehend precisely, this argument is still a major component of the company’s PR strategy in Africa. In the case of Yassir, regulators and cities are an important node of the platform that must be served as well as drivers and customers. The business of Yassir ****is about managing liquidity between drivers, customers and cities. Having a key value proposition for each is mandatory, and satisfaction from each allows Yassir to diversify into new services, such as financial services.

But before we get to that, let us focus on Yassir’s origins to understand that this diversification is part of a well-thought and executed strategy.

At the basis of all, there is a rational understanding of the constraints and needs among the population in North Africa - and french speaking africa more generally: