Yassir takes Entrepreneurship in the Maghreb to the next level by raising $30M in series A!
Yassir just announced the closing of a $30M round, the largest series A by a maghrebi startup to date.
This round included funds such as WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike (Stanford Alumni) ventures and Quiet Capital. Endeavor Catalyst (co-investment fund of Endeavor). Among many others.
We are expecting a very positive impact from this announcement in the region, confirming the potential for local startups to scale big across North Africa and raise large rounds from some of the most reputable international VC funds.
Reshaping the mobility sector in the French speaking African countries
Launched in 2017 in Algeria with focus on ride-hailing, Yassir expanded its offering to food delivery and payment services. It also quickly launched operations in Tunisia and Morocco. The company has built a strong super app of complementary services that has now exceeded 300k active users.
Covid did not stop Yassir from blooming. They doubled down on their efforts to develop last-mile delivery which very quickly made up for the decline in ride hailing activity during the pandemic. Today both businesses are blooming across the maghreb region.
A vision to make the life of customers easier while infusing a new value system
Yassir aims to revolutionize the mobility sector in the region and provide a set of services that will make people’s lives easier. Noureddine is also very attached to the role that Yassir plays in eliminating friction and infusing trust in society. His faith in the local talent made him build a performant technology and a unique product design that is highly adapted to the region’s culture. Yassir started with 5 engineers and they grew very quickly to more than 250 people mainly leveraging talent from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.
Yassir will use this round to accelerate their growth, expand their geographical footprint in Sub Saharan Africa and triple their engineering team to meet their product ambitions..
A serial entrepreneur with a think-big mindset inspiring the whole Maghreb region
Born and raised in Algeria, Noureddine holds a PHD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He jumped into entrepreneurship later by founding his first company in Silicon Valley, which he exited after an acquisition 7 years later. His entrepreneurial journey made him realize the importance for an entrepreneur of a support system with the right values; an entrepreneurial ecosystem focused on the give back and the network mentality. The inspiration to build that mindset and initiate change in Algeria was the initial inspiration to launch Yassir, multiply his model and alleviate the whole north-African region.
An Endeavor Entrepreneur who was nominated among the very best group of Endeavor Outliers globally less than a year post selection
Less than a year after being selected as Endeavor Entrepreneur in July 2020, Noureddine has joined the top entrepreneurs in the network (2021 Endeavor Outliers) thanks to the outstanding business performance. In over a year supporting Noureddine scaling his business, we have seen him put a big focus on performance and agility while working on this fundraising round. He also never missed an opportunity to share his experience with entrepreneurs in the region as part of the activities we organized.
He discussed this fundraising round in an exclusive webinar for local entrepreneurs with his lead investor Lars Nielsen from WndrCo and Allen Taylor MD of Endeavor Catalyst. Below is a 3 minutes video summary with the key takeaways. The one hour webinar is also available here.