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Ismael Belkhayat sat in front of his laptop, waiting for Oliver Samwer to fill the screen.
Samwer’s investment vehicle, Global Founders Capital, had backed Chari's seed round and had taken enough of a liking to the company to schedule quick quarterly check-ins.
It was 2022, the peak of the B2B e-commerce gold rush sweeping emerging markets. The sector had become one of the hottest categories in venture, fuelled in no small part by Tiger Global, which had taken a shining to the model and had begun aggressively attempting to kingmake startups from LatAm to Africa to Southeast Asia.
Belkhayat had plenty of skin in the game, having thrown his own hat into the ring with Moroccan outfit Chari in 2020. With the app MVP built, a WhatsApp number live, and basic logistics arranged, he personally printed out flyers and headed to the parking lots of Casablanca's cash-and-carry wholesalers. There, he waited for bacala owners wheeling out laden trolleys to load into their pickup trucks and pitched them on the spot.
"You don't need to come back to this parking lot anymore," he told them. "You can stay at your shop, save on costs, save on time, and just call this number, or download this app if you have a smartphone."
The argument was difficult to turn one’s nose up at. Chari promised to deliver the exact same basket of goods at the exact same price the shopkeeper had just paid, with delivery thrown in for free. It made the value proposition, in his words, "amazing."
On the surface, the hyper-growth that followed proved him right.
"We grew from zero to 10 million dollars in monthly GMV in less than two years," Belkhayat recalls. "We were growing 30% month over month."
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Soon, the prestigious Y Combinator stamp of approval arrived, the press began hailing Chari as a future unicorn, and, as he puts it now with the benefit of hindsight, "we felt like champions."
Then, Samwer burst onto the screen.
Forgoing pleasantries entirely, the man who once described his e-commerce strategy to country managers as a "blitzkrieg," famously writing that he would die to win and expected the same of them, cut straight to the chase.
"Look, I will tell you one thing. You will die."
Belkhayat was stunned. But Samwer wasn't finished.
“I’ve been through many crises," the German billionaire barked, "and I can tell you this one will kill you all because you don’t have any unit economics.”
By every visible measure, Chari was supposed to be ascendant. It belonged to a sprawling cohort of emerging-market startups that had spent the back half of the previous decade promising to drag the developing world's vast, fragmented, gloriously analog retail supply chains into the smartphone era.
The names had come thick and fast, spanning the globe: MaxAB, Capiter, and Cartona in Egypt; Sary and Retailo across the Gulf and Pakistan; Wasoko, MarketForce, OmniRetail and Twiga in East Africa; ShopUp in Bangladesh; Udaan in India; Ula in Indonesia.
Dozens of others trailed close behind, all chasing variations of the exact same enormous prize.
Chari carried all the markings of a definitive winner among them. It had the YC stamp, a freshly closed funding round, and a glowing press cycle casting Belkhayat as the man finally bringing software to Casablanca's corner shops.
"Fuck," Belkhayat remembers thinking as the screen stared back at him. "I had just raised at that point."
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Samwer would be proven right. The ground beneath global B2B e-commerce was about to swallow an entire generation of brilliant founders, deep-pocketed investors, and category-defining companies.
But how did it get that far? Why did so few ring the alarm? And why, after so much wreckage, are some of the survivors now starting to look more interesting than ever?
In trying to scale these companies like tech platforms, the industry was about to break them entirely. Yet before the music stopped, the thesis underpinning the whole boom looked not just reasonable, but tantalising.
To understand why, you have to go back to the beginning.
This is Part One of a two-part series charting the rise, fall and sober, more restrained comeback of the B2B e-commerce marketplace.
A big thank you to Chari's Ismael Belkhayat and Sary's Mohammed Aldossary for being so generous with their time and insights in speaking with me for this piece.
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How the "deploy, deploy, deploy" mandate from aggressive Western mega-funds warped a low-margin supply chain problem into a venture-subsidised trap.
Why the standard Silicon Valley growth model failed, and why doubling GMV in B2B physical logistics actually multiplied the losses.
How the dream of building the "OS for informal retail" forced founders into the gruelling reality of warehouse leases, delivery fleets, and negative contribution margins.
Inside the multi-million-dollar markdowns, mega-mergers (MaxAB/Wasoko, Sary/ShopUp), and the quiet exodus of some of the category's founding CEOs.
A sneak peek into what the few survivors are actually building from the wreckage, and why it is finally making money.
