Building MaxAB From a WhatsApp Group to Africa's Largest B2B Platform

In this edition of Founder's Hustle, Omar Elghazaly, co-founder and CFO of MaxAB, shares the story of leaving the world of private equity to build a company from the ground up. Driven by a mission to modernize Africa's fragmented supply chains, MaxAB grew into a leading e-commerce and fintech platform—and one of the continent's standout B2B success stories—raising more than $125 million from global investors, including Silver Lake, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, and British International Investment.

From Private Equity to the Deep End

Omar's path started far from startups. After studying economics, finance, and statistics, he landed in private equity, joining a five-person team managing a $3 billion single-LP fund for a member of a GCC royal family, writing tickets between $100 and $500 million. "We deployed something like $1.2 billion" in 18 months, he recalls, an experience that exposed him early to the full lifecycle of an investment, a fast-paced work culture, and to networks across Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE.

From there, he moved to the private equity arm of Egypt's Ministry of Investment, where the work shifted from turnarounds to greenfield investing: building companies from the ground up, including a leasing firm and a microfinancing firm that remain among the top players in their categories today. His last project with the Ministry was helping launch a $500mn EGP ($25mn USD) fund , jointly backed by the Ministry and a GCC development fund, that would later become known as Egypt Ventures. "That's what opened my eyes to the startup world," he says, as the team worked through what a new asset class for the region should even look like.

At the time, his image of startups was, in his words, people "sitting on beanbags all day with ping pong tables." That perception didn't survive contact with reality for long.

From a Business Plan to a Night Job

The idea for MaxAB came from Belal El-Megharbel, Omar's close friend and now MaxAB's CEO, who was working at Careem at the time. The opportunity came just as Omar was looking for his next challenge. Crucially, they weren't inventing something new. The B2B e-commerce model was already gaining traction in India, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, and the team flew out to see it firsthand. "We're here to learn what not to do, tell us, and we'll figure out what to do and localize it for our market," was the pitch they made to founders abroad who opened their doors.

Before MaxAB became a full-time pursuit, Omar joined elmenus as CFO. At that point, Omar was living a double life: working mornings at Elmenus as it pivoted from a restaurant listing app to food ordering, signing up 500 restaurants and building out a finance function in a matter of months, while building MaxAB at night. Eventually, the pace made the dual-track unsustainable, and he made the jump to full-time at MaxAB alongside Belal, Wael Leheta, and Mohamed Ben Halim.

What followed was, in his words, "extreme chaos." Starting from a small office in Maadi, the founding team operated with a philosophy that would shape MaxAB's culture in its earliest days: hire for people, not positions. "We never hired people for positions. We hired people for who they are and what they can bring," Omar recalled. New hires were introduced to the mission and vision, and when they asked what they were supposed to do on day one, the answer was simple: "You figure out what to do."

Africa Produces Twice What It Consumes

So what exactly is MaxAB? MaxAB is a B2B e-commerce and supply chain platform that digitizes procurement for retailers across Africa. The company sources products directly from FMCG manufacturers and delivers them to neighborhood shops through its own logistics network, replacing a fragmented chain of wholesalers and intermediaries.

From the earliest pitch decks, one line kept appearing: Africa produces roughly twice the food it consumes, yet poverty and inefficiencies remain widespread. For Omar, the problem was never a lack of resources, but a broken supply chain. That belief became the foundation of MaxAB.

The team quickly realized that simply connecting buyers and sellers would not be enough. Their most important value proposition was trust. The retailers they targeted had relied on the same wholesalers for generations, and convincing them to place orders through an app meant changing habits that had existed for more than a century. Reliability wasn't a feature; it was the business. "If we mess up the first time, we're going to lose them for good, and we're not just going to lose them, we're going to lose the entire neighborhood," Omar recalled.

To guarantee that reliability, MaxAB chose to control the experience end-to-end. Rather than relying on third-party providers that lacked the quality and consistency they needed, the company built its own warehousing and last-mile capabilities, operating the infrastructure with its own teams.

That decision also shaped MaxAB's business model. Instead of acting as a traditional marketplace, the company purchased inventory directly from manufacturers and sold it to retailers, collapsing what was often a chain of five or six intermediaries into one. Owning the supply chain wasn't just about ensuring deliveries. It gave MaxAB the ability to improve unit economics as volumes scaled, lower warehousing and logistics costs over time, and build the trust that would become the basis for deeper relationships with both suppliers and retailers.

It Started With a WhatsApp Group

Long before there was an app, MaxAB was essentially a WhatsApp group. Armed with nothing more than inventory, a phone number, and four or five sales agents on the ground, the team went door-to-door to neighborhood kiosks, promising retailers they could place orders through WhatsApp, pay cash on delivery, and receive their goods within 24 hours. The pitch was simple: "If we don't come, you have nothing to lose."

Unlike many startups that begin with a polished product, MaxAB built demand first and software second. In markets like Egypt, Omar argues that acquiring customers through strong on-the-ground execution is often more cost-effective than investing heavily in technology upfront. So rather than spending years perfecting an app, the team focused on building trust and creating operational discipline.

Even when MaxAB launched its first app, it wasn't designed primarily for retailers. It was built to optimize MaxAB's own operations. The founders knew that widespread digital adoption would take time; many shop owners didn't even own smartphones. Before COVID, only about 15% of orders came through the app, with the vast majority still flowing through phone calls and sales agents.

Then the pandemic accelerated years of behavioral change almost overnight. As supply chains froze and traditional wholesalers struggled to fulfill orders, retailers who had been hesitant to order digitally suddenly had a compelling reason to try. By 2022, roughly 75% of MaxAB's orders were being placed through the app.

That shift did more than reduce manual work. It gave MaxAB visibility into millions of data points—what retailers searched for, added to their carts, removed, and reordered—allowing the company to continuously improve retention, personalize recommendations, and optimize the customer experience in ways the team hadn't originally anticipated.

Building Credit, Layer by Layer

Financing wasn't part of MaxAB's model from day one; it took roughly two and a half years after launch to build out the fintech arm. Early on, FMCGs that normally extend 30 to 45 days of credit to wholesalers gave MaxAB nothing. "We're starting MaxAB, we want a thousand cartons, what kind of credit terms are you gonna give us? They're like, no way." So MaxAB built the relationship cycle by cycle, starting with 5 days of credit, then 10, then 15, then 30, gradually earning better terms as volume grew. Only once MaxAB itself had enough credit could it begin passing some of that along to retailers, eventually becoming, in Omar's words, "the bank" for a retailer base that was over 99% unbanked: holding their funds in wallets, underwriting them, and processing their payments.

A Startup Within a Startup

As MaxAB expanded across Egypt, the same lesson repeated: the first city is the hardest because you're still writing the playbook. Every six months, the company would outgrow its warehouse and delivery network and rebuild it from scratch. That constant reinvention is why MaxAB never bought warehouses or fleets; everything was rented and operated, designed for flexibility rather than permanence.

Once the playbook was established, expansion itself became a "startup within a startup." Small teams were sent into new regions with full ownership, building operations from the ground up before handing them off to the core organization and moving on to the next market. MaxAB applied the same model to new initiatives like fintech, funding internal teams almost like a VC backs portfolio companies, with milestones to hit and the option to shut projects down if they failed to gain traction.

Another business emerged naturally from the assets MaxAB had already built. With spare capacity in its warehouses and trucks, the company launched a logistics-as-a-service operation, at one point handling roughly 15% of Amazon's shipments in Egypt. But every new venture had to strengthen the core commerce business: geographic expansion improved bargaining power with FMCGs, logistics services boosted asset utilization and unit economics, and fintech increased retailer retention and margins. Nothing existed in isolation; everything fed back into the e-commerce flywheel.

Margins, Cash Flow, and Surviving the Hype Cycle

MaxAB could have grown much faster. "Building GMV is easy," Omar says. Selling products below cost would have produced eye-popping numbers, but that was never the goal. Instead, the company focused on gradually capturing the inefficiencies embedded in the supply chain. Between manufacturers and retailers sat five or six layers of intermediaries, each taking a 1-1.5% cut. MaxAB's opportunity was to consolidate those layers over time, expanding margins step by step rather than all at once.

That patience extended to the supply side. In the early days, many FMCGs refused to work directly with MaxAB, forcing the company to source through wholesalers. As volumes grew, MaxAB moved up the chain, often repositioning former wholesalers into logistics partners, leveraging their warehouses and fleets rather than competing against them.

Because margins would take years to build, cash flow became an obsession from day one. Long payment terms from suppliers created favorable working capital dynamics, allowing the company to balance three priorities simultaneously: improving unit economics, extending runway, and raising capital only when it unlocked the next level of scale.

Despite operating thousands of deliveries and warehouses, MaxAB was never asset-heavy. Warehouses and fleets were rented, not owned, allowing the company to continuously redesign its network as it grew. Technology played a crucial role, powering demand forecasting, inventory planning, and personalized pricing to maximize every dollar of working capital.

Fundraising also benefited from timing. During the B2B e-commerce boom of 2018 to 2021, investors prioritized growth above all else. But Omar and his team resisted the temptation to chase GMV at any cost. While competitors pursued hypergrowth, MaxAB focused on ensuring that margins, cash flow, and operating efficiency improved month after month.

That discipline proved invaluable when the market turned. As investors suddenly shifted from "grow, grow, grow" to "be profitable," many competitors struggled to adapt. MaxAB didn't need to reinvent itself. Financial discipline had already been embedded across the organization. Sales teams, commercial teams, and operations teams all tracked margins, cash flow, acquisition costs, and profitability as closely as they tracked growth.

"We knew this would become a survivor's game," Omar says.

And when the era of easy capital ended, survival itself became a competitive advantage.

Merging Two Companies, Two Cultures, 22 Entities

In summer 2024, Wasoko, a Kenya-based B2B e-commerce platform, and MaxAB finalized a merger to create Africa's largest B2B retail and fintech network.

MaxAB's merger with its East African counterpart was, in Omar's words, "one of the biggest exercises I've ever done in my life": two companies of roughly 2,000-2,500 people each, operating across 11 countries and 9 currencies, with one side structured through Dutch entities and Dutch lawyers and the other through Delaware with US lawyers, all needing to be reconciled on a timeline.

His view is that integration succeeds or fails based on alignment between leadership teams first. "If the CEOs are aligned, on work ethics, on what we're building, where we're going, that cascades down culturally across both firms, and cascades upwards across both sets of investors." 

Before any formal announcement, the leadership teams flew back and forth to make sure they were aligned on everything. Even then, the execution involved real cost: redundancies, layoffs, and months spent integrating systems and teams on the ground, with members of the Egypt team spending a full year working in East Africa. His approach was to break an overwhelming project into milestones, "you cannot look at it as one milestone," and take it one step at a time.

The Grit Behind the Journey

Looking back, Omar doesn't frame MaxAB's path as a straight line, it was chaos, course corrections, and a willingness to build things, like the company's logistics and fintech arms, that weren't part of the original plan but emerged from listening to what the business and its market needed. What stayed constant was the underlying conviction: that Africa's problem was never a lack of resources, but the inefficiency standing between supply and demand, and that closing that gap, layer by layer, year by year, was worth the grind.

Now, Omar is onto his next venture, PSFnetwork out of the US. A fintech platform rethinking how retail investors access real estate investing. The company is building a marketplace that enables ownership and AI-driven portfolio construction of real estate, one square foot at a time.