Biography
Abdel Malek Al-Mouzayen is the co-founder of Beeorder, a Syrian food-delivery startup launched in 2015, under the Assad regime. Today, Beeorder facilitates around 120,000 orders per month.
Monthly, Beeorder generates $1.8M in GMV, from which it pulls $400K in revenue. Abdel Malek also recently co-founded Salim-Pay, a separate company, which is a fintech startup based in Dubaï.
He holds a bachelors degree from the American University of Sharjah (UAE) and a masters from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland).
What’s Beeorder’s genesis?
I previously founded a company building POS software for restaurants in the region (Egypt, Jordan, KSA…).
At some point, I got interested in the tech startup buzz and wanted to build my own. I moved to Berlin and launched a startup that helped restaurants allow customers to order via a QR code. My time in Berlin introduced me to startup lore and startup linguo (pitch deck, financial projections, VCs…), terms I’d never heard of before.
We had a tough time making it work, due to difficulties integrating local payment gateways. Our tech team was in Damascus at that time as well.
In the process, we met prominent investors such as Rocket Internet and Point9. They told us we’d have a stronger competitive advantage building a food-delivery app in Syria than a QR code startup in Berlin. We heeded that advice, and moved back in 2015.
At that time, Syrians only used their smartphones for two things: WhatsApp and Facebook. We were one of the first apps empowering them to do more.
We started with an app enabling restaurants to upload their menu. Then, we let users order from the app. When we realized restaurants struggled to fulfill those deliveries, we internalized the delivery component.
Beeorder took off. Users were excited and felt like they were living in the US. We were still doing all cash-on-delivery (COD) of course, due to the lack of local digital payment options. We were upskilling our team on tech skills, downloading best UX practices documents from Facebook’s digital library, etc.
We were a productive revolving door for the early Syrian startup scene. We had talent work for us for 6 months before leaving to launch their own thing. We were fine with that.
Some of Syria’s notable startups (from the Entrepreneurship in Syria Post-Assad report)
At that point, the Syrian civil war is ongoing. How do you manage?
There’s an important distinction to make.
Until 2019, we were operating Beeorder in a country at war. That comes with a hefty set of challenges, but you manage. Startups in countries such as Ukraine, Palestine or Libya continue operating even if their country suffers from armed conflict. Paradoxically, during a war, the amount of money people send to the country skyrockets. This increases local buying power. In 2018, we even managed to get some Lebanese investors on board.
Then came the Caesar Act, a US-led sanctions package, imposed in response to a report by a Syrian photographer who’d documented the horrors of the regime. The Caesar Act cut off the Syrian economy from the rest of the world, stifling foreign investment and making international transactions extremely difficult.
Logically, the price of petrol and other raw materials shot up. This increased our delivery costs as well as restaurants’ costs, meaning price increases for the end user. In parallel, customers’ buying power was strained by the economic situation. Our best talent and the potential talent that could replace it started fleeing.
We were losing hope in 2024. Then, in December, the regime fell.
You have international school credentials, international experience, and tech expertise. You could’ve easily left too. Why stay?