Posted by In 2020 I wrote about MaxAB, a Cairo startup that wanted to fix the way Egypt’s small groceries get their stock. Six years later the company still exists, but under a different name, with different owners at the helm, and with a different idea of where the money is. Its story tracks almost exactly what happened to B2B distribution across Africa.
Where it started
Egypt’s grocery market was, and still is, dominated by small independent shops. Modern trade accounted for only around a tenth of sales, and the rest moved through a long chain of distributors and wholesalers. Goods often passed through six or seven layers of intermediaries before reaching the shelf, and every layer took a cut from margins that were already thin.
For the shopkeeper this meant little price visibility, limited access to promotions and a narrow range of products. Only the bigger outlets got deliveries at all, usually on a fixed weekly schedule, so ordering on demand was rarely possible. With little cash to spare, shops ran out of stock regularly. The consumer goods companies were not much better off. Their systems were not linked to their distributors’ data, so they had little idea what was selling where.
MaxAB was founded in 2018 by Belal El-Megharbel, a former Careem executive, and Mohamed Ben Halim. Retailers ordered through an Android app and received their goods within 24 hours. By early 2020 it was serving around 9,000 retailers from a central warehouse in Cairo, with 680 products and a fleet of 60 trucks. It kept three to four days of “just-in-case” inventory to cope with the unpredictability of traditional trade.
That year it raised a US$6.2 million seed round. The plans were to deepen its data services for manufacturers, to look at credit for retailers, to cover half of Egypt’s population within two years, and eventually to move into other North African markets.
Growth and the merger
MaxAB grew fast. By 2023 it was serving more than 150,000 shop owners in Egypt and Morocco.
Then the funding dried up, and the asset-heavy model of warehouses, trucks and thin margins started to hurt. In December 2023 MaxAB announced a merger with Wasoko, the Kenyan platform that had built the same kind of business in East Africa. On paper the combined company served around 450,000 merchants. In practice the merger came with heavy cuts. Before it closed, Wasoko pulled out of Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, shut its Zanzibar office, paused Uganda and Zambia, and laid off more than 100 staff in Kenya and India.
The deal was finalised in August 2024 as an all-stock transaction. No new money came in. The merged group, MaxAB-Wasoko, is headquartered in Cairo and now operates in five markets: Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda.
The founders did not stay long. Ben Halim left two months after the merger closed. Wasoko’s founder, Daniel Yu, stepped aside in September 2025. By early 2026 the group was handing its country operations to managers with backgrounds in finance and running profitable units rather than in startups.
From groceries to finance
The bigger change is in what the company sells. In May 2025 MaxAB-Wasoko bought Fatura, an Egyptian B2B marketplace, from EFG Finance, which took a stake and a board seat in return. Two months later it wound down its e-commerce business in Morocco and kept only the financial services there.
The credit business is where the growth now is. The Egyptian fintech arm reportedly turns over more than $180 million a year and has lent over $20 million in working capital to shopkeepers, with a claimed repayment rate above 99%. Meanwhile one of Wasoko’s early investors marked down its stake again in 2025, citing the low margins of B2B e-commerce for informal retailers.
In 2020 I noted that MaxAB’s order data could give small groceries the paper trail they need to borrow. That turned out to be the most valuable part of the business.
[FIELD NOTE: Anything you saw in Egypt’s traditional trade, for example how shopkeepers there buy on credit from wholesalers, or what the 2024 currency devaluation did to their stock and cash.]
What it says about B2B in Africa
MaxAB did solve real problems. It cut out layers of intermediaries, gave shops next-day delivery and gave manufacturers some sight of traditional trade. What it could not do was make the delivery itself pay. Moving cartons of cooking oil and biscuits to small shops in Cairo traffic is expensive, and the margin on each carton is tiny.
The lending works for the same reason the wholesaler has always been hard to displace: shopkeepers need credit more than they need an app. The platforms that survived are the ones that worked this out and turned themselves into lenders with a distribution business attached.
First published in 2020. Updated November 2026.
