Zbooni: How Dubai’s Homegrown Startup Has Introduced cCommerce to the Region

Founded in 2016, Zbooni was initially designed as a platform to assist online sellers with payment management. It was a business idea spawned when Zbooni Founder and CEO, Ramy Assaf, was trying to support his wife in her online business selling customized hats via Instagram.

Though she had the platform for advertising and marketing in an economy dominated by social media as ours is nowadays, the struggle of online payments was still an issue. “She didn’t have any way of capturing payments from customers like you would have with an e-commerce store, or keeping track of customer activity through a CRM,” Ramy explains. “We saw an opportunity to develop new tools for commerce within social and messaging apps, to reduce the frictions that busi