MaxAB

MaxAB is a Cairo headquartered B2B e-commerce and supply chain company founded in 2018 by Belal El-Megharbel, a former Careem executive, and Mohamed Ben Halim, that digitizes food and grocery distribution for informal traditional retailers across North and East Africa by offering on-demand ordering of more than 3,000 SKUs through a mobile app, with 24-hour delivery fulfilled through a network of more than 30 warehouses, transparent pricing, and a pull-driven supply chain model that replaces fragmented, opaque middlemen networks that serve approximately 500,000 mom-and-pop grocery stores accounting for 90 percent of Egypt's retail food market. Beyond its core e-commerce business, MaxAB has built a growing embedded fintech arm called MaxAB Payments, launched in 2021, which provides retailers with bill payment aggregation, digital credit, and merchant financing with a repayment rate exceeding 99 percent, and in November 2023 announced a Mastercard partnership to equip its merchant network with contactless payment infrastructure. MaxAB acquired Morocco-based B2B platform WaystoCap to deepen its North Africa presence, and in August 2024 completed the continent's largest-ever technology merger, an all-stock transaction with Kenya-based Wasoko, creating a combined entity of over 450,000 merchants across Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda serving 65 million consumers, valued at approximately 526 million dollars per VNV Global's post-merger financial report. The merged entity is co-led by Belal El-Megharbel as co-CEO, with Wasoko co-founder Daniel Yu having subsequently stepped down in early 2025, and in early 2025 the combined company also acquired Egyptian B2B marketplace Fatura, expanding its Egypt footprint to 16 cities, while the COMESA Competition Commission opened a merger inquiry in October 2025 inviting market submissions.