What is Kareem's super app model, and why does it work so well in the Middle East?
Kareem's super app consolidates ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, and other services into a single platform — unifying identity, payments, and location data under one trusted brand. According to Nourhan Farhat, VP of People, Strategy and Ventures at Kareem, this model succeeds more in the East than the West for three concrete structural reasons: more relaxed antitrust and competition regulations, an economic structure where higher disposable income relative to service costs makes thin-margin businesses like Q-commerce viable, and timing — the region went mobile-first and skipped the website era entirely.
That last point matters more than it might seem. Markets like Saudi Arabia and Dubai never built out the desktop web infrastructure that cemented single-purpose apps in the West. Instead, they built full ecosystems from the start — mobile-native, bundled, and designed for convergence. China followed a similar trajectory, and it produced WeChat and Alibaba's ecosystem for the same reasons. Kareem, founded in 2012 by Mudassir Sheikha and Magnus Olsson with the stated purpose of simplifying and improving people's lives, was positioned from its earliest days to expand beyond a single vertical.
What is Q-commerce?
Q-commerce (quick commerce) refers to ultra-fast delivery of goods — typically groceries or everyday items — within minutes of an order being placed. Its unit economics require either high order values or high consumer willingness to pay, both of which are more readily available in Gulf markets where disposable income is comparatively high relative to the cost of delivery services.
The economic argument is equally structural. In the Gulf, the gap between what consumers earn and what on-demand services cost is wide enough that even thin-margin verticals like rapid grocery delivery can sustain themselves — a condition that has proven much harder to replicate in Western markets where that spread is narrower and regulatory scrutiny of dominant platforms is far stricter. Farhat is direct: it is not that Western companies lack the ambition to build super apps, it is that the regulatory environment and the economic arithmetic simply do not favour the model the same way. You can explore the full conversation on Listenly's Beyond the Deck page.
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Strategies could be great on paper, but unless you really fix the operating model, the incentives, the entire culture of the company, the values of the company, I think that's the make it or break it."— Nourhan Farhat, VP of People, Strategy and Ventures, Kareem
About Nourhan Farhat
Farhat began her career in engineering before pivoting into management consulting — a shift she describes as almost accidental. It was a Roland Berger presentation, the very first session she ever attended on what consulting actually was, that changed her trajectory. She spent a decade in the consulting world and, by her own account, genuinely expected to stay there. The problem-solving culture suited her well, and she built deep expertise in strategic transformation across complex organisations.
The move to Kareem came as a surprise. The company approached her for a corporate strategy role, and the draw was clear: after years of shaping strategies from behind the slide deck, she wanted to own the outcomes — to operate a business with real P&L responsibility rather than advise from the outside. She joined as Head of Corporate Strategy and Chief of Staff, then progressively expanded her remit to cover both People and Ventures. Four years into holding the Head of People role — originally conceived as a temporary arrangement — she remains one of the most senior operators at one of the Middle East's most closely watched tech platforms.
Her position at Kareem makes her a uniquely credible voice on the super app question. She sits at the intersection of corporate strategy, organisational design, and new ventures at a company that has been building multi-vertical infrastructure since 2012 — long before the term "super app" became a Western talking point.
See also
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Gulf sovereign capital will remain globally active, but its role is shifting. The first phase — where sovereign vehicles like PIF funded domestic initiatives — is giving way to a more globally distributed approach.
Management talent has historically been imported from abroad for knowledge transfer, with the goal of upskilling local populations to eventually take over leadership roles.