Yassir’s $150M Bet: Building Algeria’s Answer to Grab and Gojek

The funding round has been covered. The $150M headline, the Bond-led syndicate, the super app ambition — that story is familiar to anyone following North African tech. What deserves closer examination is the harder question: what is Yassir actually building, in what order, for what strategic reason, and who might stop them?

In December 2024, Yassir reported $225.9 million in annual revenue with a team of approximately 1,500 people. That revenue figure, on its own, tells you the ride-hailing and delivery business is real. What it does not tell you is whether the payments vertical — the one that would make Yassir genuinely analogous to Grab or Gojek — is on a path to becoming a moat or a feature.

The Super App Logic in Algeria’s Market

Super apps are not a universal strategy. They work in specific market conditions that Algeria happens to satisfy on multiple dimensions.

The unbanked population is the starting condition. Algeria has a large unbanked or underbanked population, and the formal financial system charges high fees for basic transactions. Any company that can embed a trusted payment layer into an app people use daily for rides and food has a distribution advantage that no standalone fintech can replicate without years of trust building.

Trust economics is the mechanism. Users give Yassir their payment credentials after months or years of frictionless ride experiences. This is a fundamentally different trust trajectory than a fintech app asking for the same credentials on day one. Grab in Southeast Asia built its financial services on exactly this logic — rides first, money second.

Logistics density is the infrastructure lever. The driver network built to fulfill ride-hailing orders is redeployable for last-mile delivery at near-zero marginal cost. A city with 2,000 Yassir drivers for rides becomes a city with 2,000 available couriers for food and grocery delivery. This is why ride-hailing → delivery sequencing is standard across super app playbooks globally, from Grab to DiDi to Bolt.

Cross-sell math closes the business case. A user who rides with Yassir, orders food via Yassir Express, and pays via Yassir Pay has three times the lifetime value of a pure ride user, and each additional vertical adds switching cost.

Vertical Sequencing: The Deliberate Order

Yassir’s co-founder Noureddine Tayebi has been explicit about the sequencing logic. The strategy began with a “thorough examination of market conditions in Algeria” that concluded rides and food delivery addressed the highest household expense categories that Algerians were most motivated to optimize.

The current vertical stack, in order of launch:

1. Ride-hailing — the foundational product, the user acquisition engine, the trust builder. Operates in 45 cities across Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.
2. Yassir Express (food and grocery delivery) — reuses the driver network, increases daily active usage, adds merchant relationships. Delivers from partner restaurants, brand chains, grocery stores, and pharmacies.
3. Yassir Express (general retail) — expansion into electronics, cosmetics, toys, pet products. Moves Yassir from a food delivery app toward an on-demand retail platform.
4. Yassir Pay (financial services) — the company’s stated next major investment area. Aims to enable users to “pay, save, and borrow digitally.”
5. Yassir Business — B2B corporate travel management, targeting company transportation budgets. Separate enterprise product with different pricing and SLA.

The sequencing is not accidental. Each vertical either generates data that improves the next (rides → behavior data → personalized delivery recommendations → payment history → credit scoring) or reuses assets built for prior verticals (driver network, logistics infrastructure, merchant relationships).

The Payments Vertical: Where the Moat Actually Lives

Yassir’s 100,000 merchant partners are not primarily a delivery asset. They are the foundation of a merchant payment network. Every merchant onboarded to receive Yassir Express deliveries is a potential node in a Yassir Pay merchant network — already integrated, already familiar with Yassir’s operational processes.

In Algeria’s context, where formal point-of-sale infrastructure is sparse and cash-on-delivery remains the dominant e-commerce payment method, a company that can credibly offer merchants a digital payment terminal via their existing Yassir merchant account has enormous addressable market. The Bank of Algeria’s regulatory environment has been evolving — a new Monetary and Banking Law passed in 2023 enables Islamic and digital financial products, and 2025 PSP framework reforms are creating clearer licensing pathways.

Yassir’s payment moat, if it materializes, will rest on three pillars: user payment credentials accumulated through ride and delivery trust, merchant payment infrastructure distributed through the Express network, and transaction data that enables credit underwriting no traditional bank can match.

The comparison to Grab is not hyperbolic — Grab went from Southeast Asian rides to GrabPay to GrabFinancial in exactly this pattern. The question for Yassir is timing and regulatory navigation, not strategic direction.

Country-by-Country: How Yassir Adapts

Yassir operates across materially different regulatory and competitive environments. The adaptation is partly operational, partly product:

Algeria is the home market — deepest penetration (most cities), strongest brand recognition, regulatory relationships built over years. The payments vertical will likely launch most aggressively here, where Yassir has the largest merchant and user base to activate.

Morocco is a more competitive market. Careem (Uber subsidiary) operates in Morocco’s major cities. The Moroccan fintech ecosystem is more developed, meaning Yassir’s payments value proposition is less differentiated. Yassir competes primarily on price and local trust in Morocco.

Tunisia is a smaller market with a more financially integrated population — fewer unbanked users, but also fewer dominant competitors. Tunisia could be where Yassir experiments with financial services before scaling payment features to the larger Algerian user base.

France and Canada are diaspora markets. Yassir’s presence in Paris and Montreal-area cities serves the Algerian and North African diaspora — and creates a potential remittance corridor: Algerian diaspora using Yassir Pay in France to transfer value to family members using Yassir Pay in Algeria.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the longer-term growth play. Yassir describes itself as “the leading Super App for French Speaking Africa” — Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and other Francophone markets are the logical next step for a company whose operational language and brand is French-Arabic.

Competitive Threats: An Honest Map

InDrive is the most credible global threat in the rides vertical. With 280 million downloads and operations in 888 cities across 48 countries, InDrive is a scale player that Yassir cannot outmaneuver on capital. InDrive’s differentiated pricing model (riders propose fares, drivers accept) is popular in price-sensitive markets like Algeria. Critically, InDrive is now building financial services (InDrive.Money launched in Mexico and Indonesia in 2024) — which means the competitive collision is expanding from rides into payments.

TemTem is the most underestimated local threat. The Algeria-based super app has grown to over 200,000 clients, 4,000 drivers, and operations in 21 of Algeria’s 48 wilayas. TemTem has already launched a “Diaspora” feature — the first Algerian company to let overseas Algerians purchase goods and services for family members back home — that directly anticipates the remittance corridor Yassir is building toward. TemTem is smaller, but it is moving in the same strategic direction at a pace that deserves attention.

Local fintech startups — ElyssaPay, FinConnect, and others in the 2024 Algeria fintech cohort — could become competitors in specific payment verticals if they scale before Yassir Pay launches. But they lack Yassir’s distribution advantage; a fintech without 8 million users cannot replicate Yassir’s trust-based payment adoption path.

Chinese super apps — WeChat Pay, Alipay — are not currently competing in the Maghreb. If Belt and Road Initiative commercial expansion deepens Chinese economic presence in Algeria, the risk of a WeChat-affiliated entry is not zero, but it remains a long-term monitor rather than near-term threat.

What Comes Next: The Product Roadmap Analysis

Based on Yassir’s current vertical stack, stated financial services ambitions, and competitive dynamics, three adjacent moves are likely within 24 months:

Driver and merchant micro-lending. Yassir has more transaction data on its 100,000 merchant partners and driver network than any bank. Merchant cash advances — short-term loans repaid via future Yassir transaction volume — are a natural product that requires no new distribution. This is exactly the path Grab Financial Group followed.

B2B logistics. The 100,000 merchant network creates demand for inbound logistics (getting products to merchants) that outbound delivery fulfillment (Yassir Express) does not currently address. A B2B freight marketplace connecting manufacturers to Yassir’s merchant network would leverage existing relationships in a new direction.

Insurance. Micro-insurance for drivers (accident, vehicle) and riders (trip insurance) is a captive distribution opportunity. Every driver on the Yassir network is an insurance prospect who is already identifiable, risk-scored via driving data, and accustomed to in-app financial transactions.

The Regional Unicorn Path

Yassir does not need to be everywhere to reach $1 billion in valuation. It needs to dominate two things: payments penetration in Algeria (where its user base is largest) and geographic foothold in at least one Sub-Saharan Francophone market of scale.

The unicorn path runs through Yassir Pay achieving meaningful transaction volume in Algeria before InDrive’s financial services expansion reaches the Maghreb, and before TemTem — or a well-funded competitor — replicates the trust-accumulation process that is Yassir’s primary moat.

Sources & Further Reading

• How Yassir Hit $225.9M Revenue with a 1,500-Person Team in 2024 — GetLatka
• Yassir Case Study — Google Cloud
• North African Super-App Yassir Lands $150M to Fuel Expansion — Fintech Futures
• Algeria’s Yassir Picks Up $30M to Build a Super App in North Africa — TechCrunch
• How Africa’s Super App Landscape Is Evolving — Afridigest
• The Journey of Yassir — Founder Africa
• Building Africa’s Super App: Yassir’s Evolution with Team Topologies — Team Topologies
• African Super App Yassir Sets Its Sights on SA — Ventureburn
• Yassir: The Algerian Superapp Changing Daily Services in Africa — Empower Africa
• 10 Startups to Watch in 2025 in North Africa — Tech In Africa