How A Cairo Startup Used Facebook's Messenger To Make $80,000 A Month

Cairo cab drivers are not aggressive, but they are crazy. When I go to that great city, I hold on to the side of the taxicabs and pray.

The fact that I didn’t have to ride in the typical Cairo taxis was one reason my visit there last December was a pleasure. I went to the RiseUp Summit, which is a gathering of entrepreneurs from across the world at the GrEEK Campus. On call instead of the cabs: a company called London Cabs, which had clean and comfortable cars.

Cairo-based Elves, a personal concierge app, had arranged the cabs. The company, one of many in the crowded personal concierge space, has already come a long way since December. Founded by an Egyptian couple, Karim Elsahy and his wife, Abeer Elsisi, Elves has become a featured app on Messenger. Facebook generates about 30,000 hits a month for 40-employee Elves, which allows people to ask human agents for anything from travel, to hotel bookings to help find my luggage, or schedule a meeting for me. (By far most of the requests are related to travel). The human agents rely on bots to search for information and perform transactions.

Elves is interesting for three reasons. It’s a sign of how fast the Egyptian ecosystem is evolving; it offers a window into how Facebook’s Messenger is evolving as a platform for third-party software, and it offers a (somewhat disturbing) window into the way artificial intelligence is evolving.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed how well it did during RiseUp.

Zak Fassi, who works on strategic partnerships for Facebook from Dubai, reached out after the event, said Elsahy. “He recommended us to HQ and after an onslaught of SF based FB engineers using us they asked us for an hour-long deep dive with the entire M for Messenger team,” he said. “That went really well, because the console we had custom built is very similar to what they’d been building for the last couple of years.”

The connection with Facebook means Elves’ engineers have access to new features and code Facebook’s engineers are creating, and that when users in the Middle East open up Messenger, a plus sign leads to the Elves app.

Though it’s just 18 months old, Elves is already generating about $80,000 in revenue a month (though most of that comes from buying airline tickets to supply to customers, an extraordinarily low profit-margin business). With about 15 investors that have put in a combined $700,000, the 40-employee company is now raising a seed round of $1.25 million.