If you’re an online merchant in the Middle East or North Africa trying to scale your business, you’ve probably felt the pain. You’re juggling one provider for warehousing, another for last-mile delivery, a third for cross-border customs clearance, and you’re somehow expected to stitch it all together while also, you know, running your actual business. That’s the problem Flextock has been quietly building its answer to since 2021 — and today, the Cairo-born startup has $12.6 million in fresh Series A funding to prove the answer is working.
The round was led by TLcom Capital, the pan-African venture firm with a strong track record of betting on the continent’s most promising infrastructure plays, with participation from Conjunction Capital, Capria Ventures, Access Bridge Ventures, Foundation Ventures, B&Y Venture Partners, JIMCO, Alter Global, MSA Capital, and a handful of other global investors. For TLcom, this marks its third investment in Egypt — a notable vote of confidence in the country’s tech ecosystem at a time when macroeconomic headwinds, including a steep currency devaluation in recent years, have tested founder resolve across the region.
One Platform to Rule Them All
Flextock’s pitch is elegant in its ambition: instead of asking merchants to stitch together five disconnected service providers to run their operations, plug into Flextock once and access all the infrastructure you need.
“Merchants don’t need more disconnected tools — they need an operating system built for growth,” said Mohamed Mossaad, Co-Founder and CEO of Flextock. “By bringing fulfillment, shipping, cross-border expansion, and cash flow management into one unified platform, we remove the operational friction that slows merchants down.”
That platform today consists of five modular but deeply integrated products. Flextock handles fulfillment and inventory management. Flexship aggregates last-mile delivery options across carrier networks. Flexborders tackles the notoriously complicated world of cross-border trade enablement. Flexshops opens access to marketplace channels. And Flexcash provides data-driven embedded merchant financing — working capital for sellers who need liquidity to grow but can’t always access it through conventional bank channels.
Crucially, Flextock doesn’t own physical infrastructure. It partners with existing warehouses and courier networks across its markets, keeping its cost base lean while maintaining control over the quality layer through proprietary software. It’s the same asset-light playbook that has made platforms like Flexport and Shopify so capital-efficient at scale.
The results for merchants, the company says, have been striking. Merchants using the Flextock platform more than double their sales on average within their first year. The company currently processes billions of dollars in annual gross merchandise value across Egypt and Saudi Arabia — a figure that gives the Series A a solid commercial foundation, not just a promissory note.
The Problem Is Real and It’s Expensive
To understand why Flextock exists, you need to understand the structural dysfunction that defines e-commerce logistics in MENA.
The region is one of the fastest-growing digital commerce markets on the planet. MENA’s e-commerce sector reached $34.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $80.3 billion by 2029, growing at a compound annual rate of nearly 12%. Online retail penetration, currently sitting at just 9%, is expected to climb to 16% by 2030 — within a broader $750 billion retail landscape expanding at 1.5 times the global average. Saudi Arabia alone is forecast to grow its e-commerce market at a staggering 29.7% CAGR.
And yet, the infrastructure supporting that growth remains stubbornly fragmented. Merchants who want to cross borders face complicated customs bureaucracy, inconsistent couriers, and no single system that ties operations together end-to-end. As Mobola Da-Silva, Venture Partner at Capria Ventures, put it: “For millions of SMEs across Africa and MENA, unreliable fulfillment and limited access to working capital have kept e-commerce out of reach. By making logistics and cross-border selling predictable and scalable, Flextock solves a structural problem — enabling existing merchants to grow while creating conditions for new businesses to take their first step into e-commerce.”
The early Flextock bet was validated before this round even closed. The company’s 2021 $3.25 million pre-seed — the largest pre-seed ever raised in MENA at the time — was backed by the same investor conviction: that the region desperately needed someone to build the plumbing that would make e-commerce actually work for the mass market. That round drew Foundation Ventures, MSA Capital, Alter Global, Jameel Investment Management Company (JIMCO), B&Y Venture Partners, Access Bridge Ventures, Flexport — the US-based logistics giant — and Y Combinator, whose Winter 2021 batch Flextock was part of.
The Founders
Mossaad and his co-founder Enas Siam are not first-time operators parachuting into logistics with a deck and a dream. They bring credentials that map directly onto the problem they’re solving.
Mossaad previously served as Chief Strategy Officer at Elmenus, one of Egypt’s top food delivery platforms, where he helped scale revenues 5x in under a year and was instrumental in its $8 million Series B. Before that, he cut his teeth at Bain & Company, working on business turnarounds across multiple African markets.
Siam spent years managing supply operations at Nestlé across MENA before becoming General Manager of Careem Bus — the mass-transit subsidiary of Uber — where she built the product from the ground up, scaling it to 150,000 monthly rides within a year. Operational complexity and logistics-at-scale are not abstract concepts to either founder.
What’s Next for the Capital
The $12.6 million will be deployed across three priorities. First, expanding operational infrastructure in Flextock’s existing core markets of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Second, deepening the product suite across the full Flex stack — fulfillment, delivery, cross-border trade, sales channel enablement, and merchant financing. Third, aggressively accelerating merchant acquisition, as the company works to become the default commerce backbone for the region’s growing class of digital-first SMEs.
The ambition beyond those two markets is clear. Both Mossaad and TLcom have their eyes on a wider MENA sweep. The region’s e-commerce market is not a monolith — it spans Egypt’s enormous population, Saudi Arabia’s high-spending Gulf consumers, the UAE’s hyper-connected urban economy, and a long tail of markets at earlier stages of digital commerce maturity. Flextock’s asset-light model makes geographic expansion more tractable than if it had to build and own physical infrastructure in each new country.
For TLcom, which has backed companies like Andela, Twiga Foods, and Kobo360 across the continent, the Flextock thesis fits a familiar pattern: find the foundational layer that all participants in a market need, and back the team best positioned to own it. “We recognize the massive opportunity in logistics presented by the rise of e-commerce in the region,” Foundation Ventures’ managing partner Mazen Nadim said back in 2021, and the view clearly hasn’t changed. “Flextock is building the underlying infrastructure so that any e-commerce player can scale their operations on-demand.”
Why This Bet Makes Sense Now
The timing of this round is not accidental. The MENA e-commerce market is at an inflection point. Online retail penetration is still well below the 30%-plus benchmarks seen in China and South Korea, which means the runway ahead is long. Government initiatives — Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the UAE’s digital innovation strategy, Egypt’s own push toward e-government and digital payments — are pumping structural tailwinds into the space. Cash-on-delivery usage, long the default in MENA e-commerce and a drag on merchant working capital, is declining sharply — down 51% across the region — freeing up liquidity and accelerating the viability of the kind of embedded financing Flexcash provides.
Meanwhile, competition is intensifying. Temu only debuted its localized UAE site in February 2025, amplifying Gulf competitive pressures. Amazon, Noon, and Namshi continue extending their logistics tentacles. In this environment, the merchant who can’t access fast, reliable, unified infrastructure simply can’t keep up.
That’s the gap Flextock is built to fill. Not as another logistics company — but as the operating system underneath the ambitions of every merchant trying to win in the world’s next great e-commerce frontier.
