This Egyptian Startup Is Driving Telecom Giants to Rethink Their Strategies

Reaching this location of this shoot on GPS was sponsored by the crew photographer who hot-spotted me throughout our journey until I reached Raseedi’s office which thankfully had Wi-Fi. Raseedi is a startup that is inspired by my very struggle of running out of phone credit every single month.

The app does this by offering a range of services, including an automatic dialer that chooses the cheapest SIM for calls and a tariff advisor that suggests the best tariff based on user consumption.

In doing so, Raseedi has found itself taking on a whole industry, forcing telecommunications giants to rethink how they do everything from conceiving plans and bundles, to the very way that they interact with their customers.

"We discovered that 70% of the Egyptian people own two SIM cards, because the price of the minute is five times more expensive outside one’s network," Ahmed Atallah tells Startup Scene. "However, the user doesn’t know how much to spend on each SIM card." Founded by Atallah and Samuel Abdel-Malak in 2018, Raseedi's business model started off to help dual-SIM users figure out their phone plans and bundles, telling them what exactly are they paying for. Two years in, the app can be used for both kinds of users so long they owned a smart phone running on Android.

"In the beginning, we had problems with the app," Raseedi's CTO Abdel-Malak tells Startup Scene. "People wanted the app to report on their minute-by-minute consumption. They wanted to know more about the bundles, they wanted more features, and from there we knew that there is an increased demand for the app. So, we started developing it on that basis, employing a bigger team to build the application. Last year we reached 300,000 downloads."