Marwan Hassan on Carzaty's Multimillion-Dollar Exit to Kavak

July 3, 2023

EPISODE #

#56 Marwan & Hassan on Carzaty’s multimillion-dollar exit to Kavak

About this episode

Marwan Chaar and Hassan Jaffar co-founded Carzaty in 2016 in Oman. Carzaty aims at transforming the customer’s used car buying journey from a messy experience to a high trust, digital first journey. Carzaty followed a portfolio management approach to selecting, buying and pricing cars. The founders raised $5.9Mn since inception and exited to Mexico born Kavak in 2021.

The founder’s approach to building and exiting Carzaty is quite interesting as they were quite methodical and analytical. While optimizing the used car sales journey was not their passion, they were passionate about one thing, winning! From the outset, they were realistic about their exit potential and had put a target of $200Mn.

How do you ideate for a startup? Should founders build companies that can fetch a realistic exit or aim for a unicorn status but take on higher risks? How would the founders’ ambition impact their ability to raise funds from investors? We cover all that and more in our discussion.

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guest profile

Marwan Chaar & Hassan Jaffar

Marwan was the co-founder and MD of Carzaty, the region’s first multi-brand online auto-retailer, which was acquired by Kavak in April 2022. He then served as the co-CEO of Kavak in the GCC for 1 year.

Prior to Carzaty, Marwan was the VP of Project Development at GlassPoint Solar, the leader in solar energy for the oil and gas industry. GlassPoint was a cleantech company founded in Silicon Valley and at its peak had a valuation of $400M+. Marwan was part of the launch team in Oman and grew to lead new project development in the Middle East. He played an instrumental role in originating and structuring $2B of solar projects. As VP, he reported directly to the CEO.

Marwan holds master’s degrees in mechanical engineering and business from Stanford University and Harvard Business School.

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Hassan Jaffar is a seasoned investor and entrepreneur. In 2018, he co-founded Carzaty, the region’s first online auto retailer, which was sold in April 2022 to Soft-bank-backed unicorn Kavak. Hassan subsequently served as co-CEO of GCC for Kavak.

Before founding Carzaty, Hassan spent over 12 years as an investment professional at leading New-York based multi-billion dollar hedge funds and family offices where he focused on investing in the technology-media-telecom (TMT) sector. Hassan started his career as a management consultant at the New York office of leading strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Hassan holds a master’s degrees in finance and a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Texas A&M University where he graduated summa cum laude.