What the business is
A digital freight marketplace connecting shippers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to 15,000+ carriers with fixed pricing and shipment tracking.
The bet
A two-sided app with transparent pricing and live tracking can take margin from MENAP's $50B road-freight market instead of brokers.
Starting capital
$600K pre-seed in early 2019; $42M Series A (equity plus debt) in June 2021
How it started
Founded in Cairo in 2019 by Omar Hagrass (Uber EMEA expansion), Ali El Atrash (Uber MEA shared rides), Pierre Saad (Vezeeta) and Muhammad El Garem (OLX), applying ride-hailing marketplace mechanics to trucking.
What happened
After a $600K+ pre-seed, it expanded to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, reached 350 shipper partners and 15,000 carriers, and closed the $42M Series A with Maersk as both investor and customer, debt from Lendable.
What has to be true
The MENAP freight market was large, fragmented and broker-run, leaving margin for a platform.
Founders had run Uber's EMEA and MEA operations, so marketplace supply-demand balancing was known territory.
Anchor shippers like Coca-Cola created the order flow that pulled carriers onto the platform.
Maersk invested as both customer and strategic backer, de-risking the model's credibility.
What can be applied
Marketplace playbooks travel: operators who scaled Uber applied the same two-sided logic to a broker-run freight market and won an incumbent's endorsement.
Aftermath
As of June 2021 Trella employed over 100 people across Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, serving 350 shipper partners and more than 15,000 carriers, and planned to put the new funding into tech and product development.
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