Algerian startup Yassir raises $30m to build super app

Algerian startup, Yassir, announced that it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round to build an African Super app. Notable investors that participated in this round include VCs such as WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike Ventures, Quiet Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, VentureSouq, Nellore Capital and Moving Capital. Other investors include angel investors such as Cleo Sham of Uber; Thomas Layton of Upwork, Opentable and Metaweb; Rohan Monga of Gojek; and Hannes Graah of Spotify and Revolut.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Noureddine Tayebi  and Mahdi Yettou, the startup started as a ride-hailing business to take advantage of the inefficient transportations services in densely populated areas. It then proceeded to offer last-mile delivery services, creating an ecosystem of related services bringing drivers, couriers, merchants, suppliers and wholesalers and individual users on one platform.

Tayebi says the plan is to use the marketplace model to offer payment services to all parties involved and create a super app in the process.

The company says it intends to use the new funds to consolidate its growth in its existing markets by launching new products and improving existing ones. It also plans to increase its engineering team.

In an interview with Techcrunch, he said “Our approach of solving the unbanked population problem is unique in the region by offering more of a ‘banking as a platform’ solution where daily services are at the heart of it all via a super-app marketplace.”

“Such services not only build trust for all the sides of the marketplace but also use them as channels to offer these payment services, which we think is the approach that is most suited to the region. Most of our competitors are either on-demand services — ride-hailing or last-mile delivery only — or pure payment solutions. This gives us an edge over them as we build the network, the channels and the trust that are all key ingredients for the adoption of payment services at large scale,” he added.

Yassir has experienced healthy growth since its inception and was the first Algerian startup in the Y Combinator accelerator program (Winter batch) in 2020, receiving $150,000 in seed funding..

Yassir now has more than 2 million users and 40,000 partners and is available in 25 cities across Algeria, Canada, France, Morocco and Tunisia and is continuously expanding.