The idea came to Hasan Sarwar at 11pm inside a Dubai café. He asked a staff member what happened to the pastries still on display so late in the evening and was told every single one would be thrown out before morning and replaced with fresh stock the next day. That moment, multiplied across thousands of restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and grocery stores operating across the UAE every single day, became the founding insight behind Peekabox. The Dubai-based surplus food marketplace has now closed an oversubscribed $1.5 million seed round to scale the platform that Sarwar and his brother Omair built around that observation.
The model is clean and deliberately simple. Food and beverage partners list their unsold end-of-day items as surprise boxes on the Peekabox app. Consumers browse what is available nearby, reserve a box, pay through the app, and collect it during a designated pickup window. The discount is guaranteed at a minimum of 50% and runs as high as 70% off retail price, with no promo codes, no conditions, and no exceptions. For the restaurant or café partner, food that would otherwise become a complete operational loss generates incremental revenue. For the consumer, it means access to food from brands they already know at prices that make a genuine difference when the cost of living continues to climb.
The partner network Peekabox launched with is one of the most impressive elements of the story. Before taking a single dirham of external capital, the founders secured signed partnerships across more than 1,000 outlets spanning Carrefour, Costa Coffee, Tim Hortons, Dunkin, Krispy Kreme, Eataly, Pret A Manger, Union Coop, Choithrams, Grandiose, Address Hotels, Armani Café, and Peet's Coffee, alongside major franchise groups including Majid Al Futtaim, Apparel Group, Azadea, Americana, and Emaar Hospitality. Getting every large franchise group in the region behind the platform before launch reflects both the strength of the value proposition and the commercial credibility of two founders who came out of investment banking and understood how to structure a pitch for institutional partners.
