Yassir: Supercharging local talent with a North African superapp
About Yassir
Yassir is the leading superapp in the Maghreb region, operating in 45 cities across Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia with recent expansions into France, Canada, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Yassir offers on-demand services such as ride-hailing and last-mile delivery, and more recently financial services to help users pay, save and borrow digitally.
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Contact usYassir uses Vertex AI and Google Cloud to evolve its fast-growing superapp and deliver world-class service to millions of users across North Africa and beyond, while attracting top tier local talent.
Google Cloud results
- Provides multiple on-demand services to millions of users and 100,000+ partners in multiple regions with Google Cloud
- Delivers a trustworthy, comprehensive digital financial services platform in cash-centered markets
- Drives efficiency gains across the business and personalizes customer services with Vertex AI
- Attracts and retains top talent with cutting edge tools and business training programs such as Go Transform
Boosts customer retention rates by up to 20% with AI
Every superapp has an origin story. The story of Algeria's Yassir begins in 2017 with Noureddine Tayebi, the company's Founder and CEO. Born and raised in Algeria, Tayebi had spent most of his adult life in the United States, gaining a PhD from Stanford University and working with some of the best and brightest companies in Silicon Valley. But he wanted more than just personal success.
"I was looking for a way to develop talent in Algeria, either through mentorship or even with financial assistance," he says. "Eventually, I realized I had to be more active and actually create a company that could do that directly."
Yassir launched in late 2017 as Algeria's first ride-hailing app, making transport more convenient in the country's dense cities. Self-funded at first, Yassir spread quickly and within two years it received an initial round of funding that enabled it to add food and grocery delivery services. As Yassir added more products and services to its platform, it grew closer to superapp status. And every step of the way, the platform has been powered by Google Cloud.
"When we started out, we needed an infrastructure solution that we could get up and running very easily and operate with tight resources," says Tayebi. "However, we wanted more than just a technology provider. The Google Cloud team showed that they believed in our project and our wider goals."
"When we started out, we needed an infrastructure solution that we could get up and running very easily and operate with tight resources. However, we wanted more than just a technology provider. The Google Cloud team showed that they believed in our project and our wider goals."
—Noureddine Tayebi, Founder and CEO, YassirHow to build a superapp
How did Yassir succeed in a tough, cash-centered market like Algeria? "We know how to hustle," says Yassir's Founder and CEO Noureddine Tayebi. "We listen to the market and respond to its needs. I also think we are a culture and values driven company. That means people stay in the organization and work hard."
The hustle has worked and translated into spectacular growth. Just seven years after it was founded, Yassir is a fully-fledged superapp, offering food and grocery delivery and, most recently, financial services to eight million users in six countries.
Yassir might not have started out as an all-encompassing superapp, but that doesn't mean its rapid growth happened by accident. Tayebi and his team had a planned road map for Yassir's expansion that started with a thorough examination of the market conditions in Algeria.
The Maghreb region (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) holds unique challenges and opportunities for tech companies with a young, tech-savvy population that is also almost entirely dependent on cash transactions. "Cash is king in the region not because there is no banking system, but because there was a lack of trust in what was there," says Tayebi. "Originally, we saw it as a fintech challenge: how can we establish that trust and get people to pay digitally?"
Yassir found that Algeria has relatively large households (three times the size of European households on average) and a lack of public transportation infrastructure. By starting with a ride-hailing app and later on food delivery, Yassir could help ordinary Algerians manage and bring down the cost of some of their highest household expenses.
This, however, came with a great deal of complexity. "With on demand services, it's a multi-sided marketplace," explains Tayebi. "It's not just about the consumer. There's a whole network of actors—partners, couriers, suppliers, wholesaler, distributors, you name it. It's a very complex environment."
Establishing that network was a challenge, but, along with the trust generated with the other services, Yassir now had everything in place to add financial services to its app, creating a virtuous, self-reinforcing circle of market players.
Complexity at scale from the get go
If Yassir was going to succeed, it needed a technology infrastructure that could handle that level of complexity at scale and still be operated by a startup with limited resources. For its first couple of years, Yassir was entirely self-funded, so keeping costs to a minimum was paramount for its survival. With an impressive mission and product, Tayebi and his team won credit from Google Cloud as part of the Google for Startups program. This not only helped the bottom line at a crucial time, but also provided encouragement for the project. "Of all the infrastructure providers we talked to, Google Cloud were the ones who seemed to really want us to succeed in what we were trying to achieve," says Tayebi.
In its initial phase, Yassir's priorities were expansion across Algeria and the Maghreb, while continuing to deliver the best possible service to its existing customers. Building the core of its infrastructure with Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot clusters and Cloud Run enabled Yassir to create a scalable and reliable platform that manages containerized applications with minimal operational overhead. Messaging is handled with Pub/Sub, while Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Trace help Yassir's IT team ensure that the platform is as stable as possible for users.
As a financial services provider, security is a critical priority. Security Command Center enables Yassir to identify and respond to threats with comprehensive security management and risk analysis.
Evolving the technology layer with analytics and AI
As Yassir expanded over time, its technical needs changed. Data-driven from the outset, Yassir uses CloudSQL as its database management solution, with Dataproc, Dataflow, and Dataplex handling the information pipelines. However, the company's growth of its customer base and the addition of new services meant that analytics became an important part of Yassir's operations. "Having a strong analytics capability became essential for us, if not the primary driver of our growth," says Tayebi. With BigQuery, Yassir has a highly scalable, cutting edge data warehouse and analytics platform while Looker empowers decision makers across the company with real-time business intelligence insights.
In 2023, Yassir started to integrate Vertex AI into its platform to bolster its machine learning capabilities, optimize processes, and improve automations. "With Vertex AI, we can streamline our machine learning processes, from design to production, offering a unified platform for model development and deployment," says Tayebi. "We expect notable efficiency gains, particularly in reducing the time from model development to deployment from several weeks to a matter of days."
Yassir's adoption of AI has made an impact across the business. In its ride-hailing operations, for instance, Yassir's predictive models have reduced driver assignment times by 50 seconds in initial testing, resulting in a better customer experience and fewer ride cancellations. For its delivery services, AI has helped optimize logistics for improved efficiency, less waste and more sustainable operations. A new personalized recommendation system indicates that Yassir's grocery delivery service app will improve revenues by an estimated 20% and increase average order values by as much as 25%.
"With Vertex AI, we can streamline our machine learning processes, from design to production, offering a unified platform for model development and deployment. We expect notable efficiency gains, particularly in reducing the time from model development to deployment from several weeks to a matter of days."
—Noureddine Tayebi, Founder and CEO, YassirGenerating business, honing talent, always improving
In just seven years, Yassir has gone from ride-hailing startup to multi-regional scale-up to North Africa's largest superapp, delivering world-class services to millions of customers and building a thriving marketplace for more than 100,000 commercial partners. Having secured $150 million in Series B funding in 2022, the company shows no signs of slowing down. With targeted marketing strategies and improved customer experiences, Yassir estimates a 15% increase in new customer acquisition and a 20% improvement in customer retention rates.
For Tayebi, however, growth is more than just watching customer acquisition and revenue numbers go up. Finding, recruiting, and developing top local talent continues to be fundamental to the success of the company. With Google Cloud and its suite of cutting edge tools, Yassir has attracted and retained top tier talent, becoming one of the largest tech employers in the region. "Working with Google Cloud helps us promote a culture of democratized data and agile workflows within Yassir," explains Tayebi.
Yassir's collaboration with Google Cloud is about more than just technological matters. In late 2023, the company put its top executives through Go Transform, a program that trains business leaders to manage transitions and learn from Google's own executives. "Go Transform was a great opportunity for us to get our senior team together and talk about the business side of things like working together as a team, learning how to scale properly, and how to grow as an organization," says Tayebi.
Yassir's journey with Google Cloud is far from over. The company is currently testing AutoML to further customize and automate its machine learning models. More fundamentally, Yassir is exploring Apigee as it prepares to shift to an API-first approach to create a cohesive ecosystem where all of Yassir's products can interact seamlessly and interact with third party services.
"Our collaboration with Google Cloud is crucial in our quest to become the leading superapp in Africa," says Tayebi. "We're looking forward to integrating AI and other tools into our operations to stimulate our growth and efficiency."
"Our collaboration with Google Cloud is crucial in our quest to become the leading superapp in Africa. We're looking forward to integrating AI and other tools into our operations to stimulate our growth and efficiency."
—Noureddine Tayebi, Founder and CEO, YassirTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Yassir
Yassir is the leading superapp in the Maghreb region, operating in 45 cities across Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia with recent expansions into France, Canada, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Yassir offers on-demand services such as ride-hailing and last-mile delivery, and more recently financial services to help users pay, save and borrow digitally.