Yassir Acquires Kawarizmi: Algeria’s First Retail Media Play

Two Acquisitions in Five Days

In the span of five days in March 2026, Yassir made two moves that together reveal a strategy far more ambitious than ride-hailing.

On March 8, the company acquired the UNO Hypermarché chain from Cevital Group, Algeria’s largest private conglomerate, rebranding the stores as Yassir Market. The flagship location at Bab Ezzouar shopping centre in Algiers is set to reopen during Ramadan 2026, according to Tech In Africa and algerie-eco.com.

Five days later, on March 13, Yassir announced plans to acquire Kawarizmi Group, a Paris-based programmatic advertising agency specializing in Africa, the Middle East, and diaspora audiences across Europe. The deal, pending regulatory approval, will see Kawarizmi operate as a specialized advertising unit within Yassir Group, according to Ecofin Agency.

Taken separately, these look like a retail expansion and a marketing hire. Taken together, they form the foundation of something that does not yet exist in North Africa: a retail media network.

What Is Kawarizmi?

Kawarizmi Group was founded in 2019 in Paris by Hakim Hattou and Salif Diop. The firm specializes in programmatic advertising — automated, data-driven media buying — with a focus on African, Middle Eastern, and diaspora audiences, according to the company’s website.

The agency has delivered over 2,000 campaigns for clients including L’Oreal, Canal+, Samsung, Qatar Airways, Air France, Orange, UNICEF, EcoBank, Wafacash, and Société Générale, as verified on kawarizmi.com. At the time of the acquisition announcement, Kawarizmi maintained a portfolio of 76 clients, according to The Condia.

Kawarizmi holds certified partnerships with Google, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Adjust, and AppsFlyer, per the company’s website. In early 2023, the firm expanded its physical presence by opening offices in Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire) and Dakar (Senegal), following its participation in Chapter54, a European acceleration program for scale-ups targeting African markets, according to Ecofin Agence and Ratecard.fr.

What makes Kawarizmi strategically valuable is not just its client list or technical capabilities. It is the firm’s specialization in markets where Yassir already operates — North Africa, West Africa, and the Middle East — combined with its expertise in reaching diaspora communities across Europe.

The Retail Media Logic

To understand why Yassir wants an advertising company, you need to understand what retail media is and why it has become one of the fastest-growing segments in global advertising.

Retail media is advertising that runs on platforms where people shop. Amazon pioneered the model: when you search for a product on Amazon, the sponsored results at the top are retail media. Amazon knows what you are looking to buy, which makes that ad impression far more valuable than a generic display ad. Amazon Advertising generated over $56 billion in revenue in 2025 — making it the third-largest digital advertising business in the world, behind only Google and Meta, according to Marketplace Pulse.

The model has since been adopted by Walmart, Instacart, Uber, and notably by Grab in Southeast Asia. GrabAds generated $176 million in full-year 2024 revenue and was running at a $216 million annualized rate by Q4 2024, according to GabGrowth analysis of Grab earnings. The logic is the same everywhere: a platform that knows what you buy, where you go, and how you pay has advertising inventory that is more valuable than almost anything else in digital media.

Yassir has precisely this kind of data. With over 10 million users across ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, payments (Yassir Cash, backed by a network of over 5,000 agents), and now physical retail (Yassir Market), the company sits on a rich set of first-party transaction data, per figures reported by Tech In Africa.

What Yassir lacked was the technical infrastructure and advertiser relationships to monetize that data. Kawarizmi provides both.

Tayebi’s Strategic Vision

Noureddine Tayebi, who co-founded Yassir in 2017 alongside Mahdi Yettou, was explicit about the strategic intent. In a statement reported by The Condia, Tayebi said: “Advertising and retail media are strategic pillars for Yassir’s next phase of growth.”

Hakim Hattou, Kawarizmi’s co-founder and CEO, framed the deal from the other direction: joining Yassir enables scaling “exponentially, combining media excellence with one of the most powerful consumer ecosystems in emerging markets,” per the same reporting.

The vision is a closed-loop system. A consumer uses Yassir to commute, order dinner, buy groceries at Yassir Market, and pay with Yassir Cash. Each of these interactions generates data about preferences, location patterns, and spending behavior. Kawarizmi’s programmatic infrastructure then allows brands — from local Algerian businesses to international advertisers — to target those consumers with ads served through Yassir’s own platform, across the open web, on connected television, and on mobile. According to The Condia, the combined Yassir-Kawarizmi data pool would encompass approximately 100 billion data points.

This is precisely the model that GrabAds built in Southeast Asia, where Grab’s combination of ride-hailing, food delivery, and payments data created advertising inventory that grew from a $100 million run rate in early 2024 to $176 million in full-year revenue by year-end.

The Acquisition Timeline

Yassir’s acquisition pattern over the past three years reveals a deliberate vertical integration strategy:

The pattern: geographic expansion (KooL in Tunisia), commerce infrastructure (Flink, UNO), and now data monetization (Kawarizmi). Each acquisition adds a layer to the super app stack, and each layer generates data that makes the advertising layer more valuable.

The Market Opportunity

The digital advertising market across Yassir’s operational territories — North Africa, West Africa, the Middle East — is growing rapidly but remains underdeveloped compared to mature markets.

The Middle East and Africa programmatic advertising market was valued at $20.05 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $31.62 billion by 2031, growing at a 7.89% CAGR, according to Mordor Intelligence. Africa is the fastest-growing sub-region at a 9.12% CAGR. Within this market, retail and e-commerce advertising accounts for approximately 19.70% of total programmatic spend.

For Yassir, the opportunity is to capture a share of this growing market not as a publisher selling display ads, but as a platform selling access to high-intent consumer data — users who are actively buying, paying, and moving through Yassir’s ecosystem.

No other company in North Africa currently operates a retail media network of this kind. Traditional digital advertising in the region is dominated by Google and Meta, with local players largely limited to agency services. Yassir, with Kawarizmi’s infrastructure, is positioning to become the first homegrown alternative — a platform that can offer advertisers something Google and Meta cannot: closed-loop attribution from ad impression to in-app purchase.

What This Means for Algeria’s Digital Economy

Yassir’s retail media play has implications beyond the company itself.

For Algerian advertisers: Local businesses that currently rely on basic Facebook and Google ad campaigns may gain access to a platform with higher-intent targeting — reaching consumers within a purchasing environment rather than a social media feed. This could particularly benefit FMCG brands, restaurants, and service providers operating in Yassir’s delivery and payments ecosystem.

For the advertising industry: Algeria’s digital advertising market has been almost entirely dependent on foreign platforms. A domestically operated retail media network — even one built on a Paris-based acquisition — would represent a structural shift in where advertising money flows.

For Yassir’s economics: Retail media is a high-margin business. Amazon’s advertising division operates at significantly higher margins than its retail operations. If Yassir can replicate even a fraction of this model, advertising revenue could meaningfully change the company’s unit economics — transforming user transactions from a cost center (subsidized rides, delivery fees) into a data asset that generates revenue on its own.

For the broader ecosystem: Yassir’s move fills a gap left by Jumia’s exit from Algeria in February 2026, as noted by Launch Base Africa. Jumia had contributed approximately 2% of its total GMV from Algeria before shutting down operations, per Business Day. Where Jumia attempted e-commerce without a logistics moat, Yassir is building commerce on top of an existing logistics network — and now adding an advertising layer on top of both.

Open Questions

Several important unknowns remain:

Regulatory approval. The Kawarizmi acquisition is pending regulatory approvals, per Ecofin Agency. The timeline and conditions have not been disclosed.

Data privacy. Building an advertising network on user transaction data raises questions about data protection under Algeria’s Law 18-07 on personal data protection (enacted June 2018), which was recently strengthened by Law 11-25 (July 2025) — adding requirements for Data Protection Officers, processing records, and Data-Protection Impact Assessments, according to CookieYes. How Yassir structures consent and data usage across its ride-hailing, delivery, payments, and advertising functions will be scrutinized.

Execution risk. Building a retail media business requires not just data and ad tech — it requires advertiser education, self-serve tooling, measurement infrastructure, and a sales organization. Grab took several years to scale GrabAds from concept to $176 million in annual revenue. Yassir is starting from a smaller base in markets with less mature digital advertising ecosystems.

Competition. Google and Meta dominate digital advertising in North Africa and are unlikely to cede ground easily. Yassir’s advantage is its first-party data — but maintaining that advantage requires scale, consistent user growth, and trust.

The Kawarizmi acquisition is a signal, not a conclusion. Yassir has laid out a strategy that is sophisticated, well-sequenced, and clearly inspired by the most successful platform companies in the world. Whether it can execute in Algeria’s specific market conditions — with its regulatory environment, payment infrastructure challenges, and competitive dynamics — remains the open question.

Sources & Further Reading

• Algeria-based Yassir expands into media distribution with planned acquisition of Kawarizmi — Ecofin Agency
• Why Yassir bought Kawarizmi — The Condia
• Algeria’s Yassir acquires Uno hypermarkets, moving into physical retail — Tech In Africa
• Kawarizmi Group — Official Website
• Yassir raises $150 million in Series B funding — TechCrunch
• Algerian super app Yassir buys Uno hypermarkets — Launch Base Africa
• GrabAds: Advertising on Southeast Asia’s super app — Grab
• Grab Q2 2025 Earnings Review — GabGrowth
• Middle East and Africa Programmatic Advertising Market — Mordor Intelligence
• Algeria’s Yassir acquires Tunisian delivery startup KooL — Launch Base Africa
• Yassir acquires Flink France — Goodwin Law
• Bredin Prat advises on Flink France sale — Bredin Prat
• Yassir reprend les hypermarchés Uno — algerie-eco.com
• Jumia to exit Algeria — Business Day
• Amazon’s advertising breaks new records — Marketplace Pulse
• Algeria Data Protection Law 18-07 and amendments — CookieYes
• Kawarizmi 76 clients, Africa offices — Ratecard.fr