Omar and Moatasem are bootstrapping to get their start-up, E-Masary, off the ground. They currently make money selling e-top-up to small-scale merchants who in turn sell minutes to end users with pay-as-you-go plans. But while other e-top-up resellers require merchants (e.g. street vendors, kiosks, cyber cafes, etc.) to install point-of-sale (POS) hardware for e-top-up transfers, E-Masary has developed a door-todoor

sales model and technology platform that lets merchants pay for (and sell!) e-top-up minutes in cash. They’ve already signed supplier deals with Vodafone, Etisalat, and Mobinil – the three largest telcos in Egypt – and have 1200 merchants signed up with EMasary accounts. In 2010, 53,000 mobile phone users purchased top-ups using E-Masary’s platform. Omar and Moatasem know they have a long way to go between their current B2B business and their dreams, but they’re moving fast to take advantage of

favorable market trends in Egypt. Top-ups may be low margin, but they’re just the first piece of a bold entrepreneurial puzzle.

Omar and Moatasem bring deep industry expertise to their business. After earning an MBA from the American University in Cairo, and working in the telecom space for more than a decade, Omar was promoted to Senior Manager at Vodafone Egypt in 1998. Moatasem, who was raised in Kuwait, came to Egypt to pursue his bachelor’s degree in Communications & Electronics Engineering at Ain Shams University. After graduating in 1989, he worked at Phillips, Schlumberger, and IBM in Cairo before leaving to attend the Maastricht School of Management in the Netherlands. Armed with an MBA, he, too, landed a job with Vodafone Egypt. In 2005, Omar and Moatasem met while working on “Vodafone Cash”, the company’s first mobile-money service. The service allowed Vodafone customers to transfer funds to other Vodafone customers who could then withdraw cash from Vodafone affiliates. Over two years, the entrepreneurs developed and rolled out the program – and simultaneously came to realize that Vodafone’s vision for the technology was extremely limited. To their disappointment, it allowed users who had credit cards to exchange top-up minutes and money within the Vodafone network, but provided no services to Egypt’s vast unbanked population.