Dalia Kamar: Hi, and welcome to another segment of Taking Stock. I’m Dalia Kamar, head of investor and startup programs here at Money20/20 Global, and we are live in the Middle East with Mohammed Aldossary, the co-founder and CEO of SILQ. Hi, Mohammed. Thank you so much for joining us today. Yesterday you had an incredible announcement on our main stage: 500 million riyals in a new fund for SME financing. You’ve spent so many years building one of the largest B2B e-commerce platforms, and you saw tens of thousands of merchants, but it seems that all of them came back to the same problem, liquidity. At what point did you realize it wasn’t access to the product itself, which you were building, but rather access to capital?
Mohammed Aldossary: Absolutely. I’m excited to be here with you. When we were building [unclear: “Sadie”] over the last seven years, we’ve seen a lot of businesses grow. We processed more than 20 billion in transactions, for more than 50,000 businesses, and almost more than 10 million in terms of transactions. We’ve seen a lot of businesses that have the ambition and the opportunity, yet they were not able to scale. One of the issues causing them not to scale is their cash flow, and it’s not about the quality of their customers or the digitization of their systems. They kept coming back to say, you solved the commerce layer for us, but we want to grow, and we have a proper customer, or a supply chain, or some kind of opportunity coming to us, and we can unlock better margin if you give us more liquidity. So it felt natural for us to help the merchants we digitized initially, to enable them to grow. If you ask me today what our role is versus our role seven or eight years ago, back then we were just acting as an operator. Now we’re becoming more of an enabler. Layer one: make that transaction digital. Layer two: how can we make liquidity available so we avoid that cash flow friction. And with AI, it’s becoming exciting: how can we make that automated. One of the things I’m challenging my team on is how we can make businesses [unclear: “sell front”]. With a single entrepreneur, with micro businesses, with two to three people, how can we help them grow with a minimum amount of capital friction and make it easier for them?
Dalia Kamar: And you’ve helped many grow. Before launching [unclear: “Fina”], you had already facilitated over 2 billion SAR in transactions. So why now? Did you feel it was time for that institutional capital, and that [unclear: “Joel”] was the right partner to really take this forward with you?
Mohammed Aldossary: When we built up a lot of merchants, especially merchants selling to the market a brand that is massive, like PepsiCo or others, they came to us and said, we love what you are doing within your ecosystem, but how can that solution become more of a mainstream solution for the B2B economy? I have deployed more than 2 billion within our ecosystem through flexible payment, and the question always coming from the buyers we work with and the sellers we work with is, how can that become available outside your ecosystem? So the fund yesterday was critical for us to take some of our learnings, technology and proprietary deployment to the wider B2B ecosystem and, in a sense, democratize that access to capital. People have felt the magic of what we’re doing in our ecosystem, and we just want to make it more universal in the B2B ecosystem.
Dalia Kamar: Well, Mohammed, I wish you the best of luck, and it was a pleasure having you here at Taking Stock, live from the Middle East.
