In October 2020 the consulting trade site Consultancy.me ran a headline that summed up Wahaj Ahmed's career in a sentence: a MENA startup founded by an ex McKinsey consultant had raised 2.3 million dollars. The startup was Retailo, a B2B marketplace for corner shops, and the round was, by MENAbytes' count, the largest pre seed ever raised by a Saudi headquartered startup.
Ahmed is a cofounder of Retailo, the Riyadh headquartered marketplace and distribution platform that lets small retailers and restaurants order fast moving consumer goods by app for next day delivery. Founded in July 2020 by three former Careem executives from Pakistan, it operated in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates and raised about 60 million dollars in disclosed funding by late 2023.
His story matters as one of the clearest examples of a Pakistani operating career travelling outward: from Rocket Internet and Careem in Karachi, through McKinsey, to a company built for the Gulf. It also carries a warning about the limits of the public record. What he does now is unclear, and this profile says so.
The startup builder, then the ride hailing company
Ahmed's route there ran through Pakistan's first wave of venture backed companies. He started at Rocket Internet, the German startup builder behind Daraz and Foodpanda, as a regional channel marketing partner. In 2016 he joined Careem, the Dubai ride hailing company, to lead growth in Karachi.
Entrepreneur Gulf, in a 2024 profile of the trio of Retailo founders, reported that he holds two bachelor's degrees from LUMS in Lahore, in accounting and finance and in computer science. The same piece, which is brand journalism and whose figures are the company's own, lists a marketing manager role and an assistant general manager post at Careem before McKinsey.
Ten times Karachi in eight months
The numbers Careem and Retailo later attached to that period are striking. According to the company statement reported by MENAbytes in October 2020, Ahmed became Careem's youngest general manager at 25 and grew the Karachi business tenfold in eight months.
Consultancy.me put it differently, reporting that Karachi grew 150 percent in five months and that the city's annual revenue passed 100 million dollars. The two accounts do not match, and the difference is not explained. Both figures are company reported, and neither has been independently audited.
McKinsey and the decision to leave
In 2017 he left for McKinsey and Company, joining as a fellow and rising to associate. By Consultancy.me's account he left the firm in June 2020 to launch Retailo with two former Careem colleagues.
They were Talha Ansari and Muhammad Nowkhaiz. MENAbytes described Ansari as the youngest chief executive of Foodpanda Pakistan, at 25, and later a senior director of operations at Careem, and Nowkhaiz as Careem's head of strategy. Entrepreneur Gulf adds that Ansari studied at the Institute of Business Administration and had worked at Rocket Internet, and that Nowkhaiz, a LUMS graduate in economics and political science, had earlier founded Tazadaily and led strategy at the Careem network.
The timing is notable. Leaving a consulting job in the middle of a pandemic, to start a company in a different country, was a bet on a particular idea: that small shops in the Gulf and Pakistan still bought their stock in person and could be moved onto an app. That reading of the decision is the magazine's, not Ahmed's own.
A pre seed, a seed and a Series A
Retailo came out of stealth on 12 October 2020, MENAbytes reported, with a 2.3 million dollar pre seed round led by Shorooq Partners of Abu Dhabi. 500 Durian, the Southeast Asian fund of 500 Startups, and 92 Ventures took part with angel investors. The company said it would start with small grocery stores in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which it called a 100 billion dollar opportunity, and that it wanted to serve the more than 10 million small businesses of the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. It had launched in Karachi a few months earlier and had only recently opened in Riyadh.
“Seed stage investing is all about backing the right people.”
The pre seed was followed by a 6.7 million dollar seed in May 2021 and a 36 million dollar Series A in February 2022. Gulf News reported on 4 February 2022 that the Series A was a mix of equity and venture debt, led by Graphene Ventures of Silicon Valley, with 500 Global, Agility, Aujan, Tech Invest Com and Mentor's Fund, and venture debt from Nahda Fund. Shorooq Partners, Abercross Holdings, Arzan VC and AgFunder returned. The company put its total at 45 million dollars in under 18 months of operation, though it later gave a larger disclosed total of about 60 million dollars by late 2023.
Revenue, then people
At the Series A, by its own account, Retailo served more than 50,000 retailers a month across more than 10 cities in three countries, with a catalogue of more than 5,000 products delivered within 24 hours and buy now pay later credit lines. Entrepreneur Gulf later reported claims of more than 300 communities served and more than a million orders through the app. All of these are company figures.
“We are impressed with what Retailo has achieved in an astonishingly short time.”
When Gulf News photographed the three founders for the Series A, its caption gave Ahmed's title as cofounder, chief revenue officer and acting chief human resources officer. The pairing is unusual: the person responsible for selling to shopkeepers was also, for a time, in charge of hiring and managing the people who did the selling.
A crowded field of Careem alumni
Retailo was not alone. MENAbytes named three direct rivals at launch, each with its own Careem link: Sary in Saudi Arabia, which had raised a 6.6 million dollar Series A and was cofounded by a former Careem general manager, Mohammed Aldossary; Bazaar in Pakistan, cofounded by Saad Jangda, a founding member of Careem Now; and Dastgyr, also founded by Careem alumni. Bazaar went on to raise 70 million dollars and Dastgyr 37 million dollars in 2022, so the comparison with Retailo's 36 million dollars is a fair one.
The cluster says something about Careem as a training ground. The people who knew how to run last mile delivery in Karachi, Lahore and Riyadh had also seen how many small shops there were, and how little they could buy online.
A trio on a stage
Ahmed has also appeared on the Startup Grind stage as a Retailo cofounder, and the Entrepreneur Gulf profile treats him as one of three equal founders. The Series A caption is the only public indication this magazine found of how he divided the work with his cofounders, and it places him on the commercial and people side.
Where he is now
What he does now is less clear. The data aggregator Tracxn, in a profile updated in October 2026, lists him as a former cofounder and chief revenue officer. No news report of a departure has been published and Retailo itself has not announced one. The magazine could not reach him for comment, and a search for reports of layoffs, a shutdown or a sale of the company found nothing.
The reasonable conclusion is narrow: his role as cofounder and chief revenue officer is documented through 2022, and a database now marks it as past. Readers should treat the titles in this profile as a description of what he did, not necessarily of what he does.
What the story shows
Ahmed's career is a compact record of how Pakistani operators have moved into Gulf commerce. He learned growth at Careem, discipline at McKinsey, and then used both in a market, Saudi Arabia, that was ready for B2B ecommerce but short of local founders who had run one.
The unanswered question is what became of the company's early promise. The disclosed funding is large for a startup of its age, and the company operated in three countries. Whether his departure, if it happened, was a handover or a break, and what the company looks like without its founding trio, are matters for the next report, not this one.
