How Mounir Nakhla Built MNT-Halan Into Egypt's First Unicorn

From studying microfinance to financing tuk-tuks on the ground

Nakhla's business began with a research question that turned into a conviction. At university he studied the impact of microfinance, a field his uncle worked in, and travelling the villages and cities of Egypt he saw an economy very different from the one he grew up in. That was the first inspiration. It took him about eight years learning the trade before Egypt's largest automotive distributor approached him in 2010 to introduce credit to their tuk-tuk business, then selling around 30,000 units a year with a target of 100,000.

Rather than trust the pitch, Nakhla drove three hours from Cairo to the largest village selling tuk-tuks and worked his way up the supply chain, asking each seller what they paid and how many they moved. He found a 20 per cent trading margin sitting inside the product before any financing margin, which reshaped his negotiation. He would distribute and finance, and take a trading margin too, changing the economics of the whole company. The company was seeded with about $2 million, sold its first 64 tuk-tuks in March 2010, and by June Nakhla had signed his first bank loan for the local currency equivalent of another $2 million. That was his introduction to leverage. "First, I'm making money with my own money, but then I'm making money on other people's money," he said.

A lending licence and the shift into microfinance and SME credit

The next turning point was regulatory. For years the company had been selling on instalments while paying value-added tax, because there was no licence for private companies to lend. Nakhla kept adding product to a growing distribution network of hundreds of locations: motorcycles, cargo tricycles, refrigerators. In early 2014 the government banned tuk-tuk imports for three months, a period he names as one of the two most stressful of his career. When a lending licence arrived in late 2014, he rushed to establish a microfinance company, moving into group loans for women and then into business and SME lending.

Walking away from ride-hailing to bet on financial services

The most consequential pivot was giving up a business that was growing fast. In 2017 a shareholder's shareholder encouraged Nakhla to spend a day with the founder of GoJek in Indonesia, then a billion-dollar super app. MNT was transacting at roughly a $150 to $160 million valuation at the time, and the gap made him ask why technology-led firms were worth so much more. He found a co-founder, brought in Ahmed, and launched Halan as a ride-hailing company. By 2019 it was doing about 3 million rides a month, had added e-commerce and a closed-loop wallet, and was burning a million dollars a month.

That burn rate, and what was coming, worried him. In summer 2019 he was raising a $15 million round he expected to burn through in under twelve months. The VC world, he recalls, was not talking about unit economics or path to profitability, only growth. He also disliked the behaviour the ride-hailing incentives produced, with drivers running token rides with family members to hit targets. His conclusion was to put all the company's energy into financial services, where he already had scale but where the systems were breaking down.

Consolidating everything under one umbrella through COVID

Executing the pivot meant buying out shareholders who did not share the vision, on both sides. The tech and VC backers wanted to disrupt the finance business rather than merge with it; the finance-focused shareholders did not want to absorb a loss-making company carrying 70 to 90 engineers. The only way forward was fresh equity. Nakhla was raising that money in the fourth quarter of 2019 when COVID hit in early 2020, deteriorating the loan book as customers stopped paying and markets closed. He got through on patience, meditation and sport, closed a $120 million round in 2021, and put everything under one umbrella. Most of that money went to secondary transactions buying out shareholders who wanted to de-risk.

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Building the technology platform and expanding across borders

With the group consolidated, MNT-Halan built out its own stack and looked abroad. It put in place a proprietary core banking system called Neuron, built on microservices, then added an open-loop wallet, grew e-commerce, and introduced savings and investment products including fast-growing money market funds. Nakhla frames his own job plainly: not to grow the company 20 per cent a year, which is the managers' work, but to move it from a billion to five billion, from 100 million to a billion.

That logic drove expansion. The company relocated its head office to the Netherlands for domiciling and fundraising reasons, then made its largest move: a Turkish acquisition valued north of $150 million that took 15 to 16 months to close and completed in summer 2024. Nakhla, who calls himself a deal maker by nature, was drawn by a similar culture, a comparable business, and the scale of the combination. Turkey and Egypt each have populations of around 100 million, and Turkey's economy is roughly three times the size of Egypt's. MNT-Halan now operates in Egypt, Turkey, UAE and Pakistan, with cumulative fundraising he estimates at four to five hundred million dollars.

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Why did MNT-Halan survive when other emerging-market startups went bust?

The short answer is unit economics and dollar discipline. Nakhla argues the loss-making playbook of Uber and Amazon worked because they were born in the United States, with abundant VCs and deep successive funding rounds. On his side of the world, raising $10 to $15 million is easy but raising $100 million to keep growing a loss-making business is not. When US interest rates rose, funding dried up and he can name a handful of startups that went bust for lack of capital. Because MNT-Halan's average loan size is effectively dollar-linked through high, exchange-rate-driven inflation, its loan book adjusts and the business has kept growing in dollar terms even through currency devaluation.

How is MNT-Halan using AI today?

AI runs inside specific parts of the business rather than as a headline strategy. Nakhla points to customer response bots, the call centre, and elements of the credit scoring and behavioural models. There is also a large language model plugged into the company's data that he can query directly, asking which loan book is riskiest, who to promote or fire, or how to increase profitability. On the wider question, he is blunt: AI will take jobs "in the millions and tens of millions" and will be totally disruptive across all industries, and in five years the world will not look like it does now. For MNT-Halan, though, he treats it as a tool to serve customers better, not the next pivot.

What is next for MNT-Halan?

The immediate strategy is more countries and deeper products, not a new technology bet. Nakhla wants to grow into other GCC markets, possibly Saudi Arabia, while each existing country runs its own journey: Earned Wage Access in the UAE reached 200,000 loans in its first year with three people, and Pakistan is launching its app and card after a bank turnaround. The bigger prize is linking the markets together through remittances, given Egypt alone collects some $39 to $40 billion a year. The problem he says he is really trying to solve is moving from 2 million active customers to 10 million. On stablecoins he is positive where regulation allows, seeing them as a potential cross-border rail and a hedge alongside gold in emerging economies.