Dear reader,
The Realistic Optimist usually writes about startups with a direct, tangible impact on their national market. Think a Tunisian neobank, a Mexican digital auto-insurance, or a Kenyan EV startup.
Today, we transgress our own rules.
We justify this rare trangression by the universal nature of the topic at hand. Kaphera, the subject of this article, specializes in sovereign data sharing.
Behind this admitedly dry jargon hides a simple concept: how do companies share their data with suppliers, partners, clients, and public authorities? And vice-versa?
While this data sharing is crucial for topics ranging from R&D to compliance, it often happens haphazardly. Every data-sharing agreement means new negotiations, messy Excel sheets to track, endless follow-up emails to send...
For companies, this data-sharing inefficiency becomes a serious problem when regulation such as the EU's Digital Product Passport ask them to seriously up their game.
In this interview with Kaphera's co-founder, Mehemed Bougsea, we cover:
1) How a service business turned into a SaaS one.
2) How Kaphera commercializes an open-source framework.
3) How Kaphera positions itself as the philosophical opposite of Palantir.
4) Kaphera's novel steward-owned structure.
5) Why a seemingly less "commercial" company structure can yield better "commercial" results.
6) Why new EU regulation acts as a propellant for the business.
7) Kaphera's various public-private partnership use cases.
... and much more.
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Biography
Mehemed Bougsea is the co-founder of Kaphera, a startup helping organizations share their data with clients, suppliers, and public institutions safely. Kaphera’s product enables companies to customize how and which data they share with others, retaining their data sovereignty.
Kaphera is making around €250K in ARR. They are currently closing their pre-seed round, aiming for a €1M close by February 2026.
Prior to Kaphera, Mehemed founded Think-it, a software development agency. Kaphera is a natural evolution of recurring themes his team worked on. He is based between Tunisia and Germany.