Hamza Iraqui Bet $17 Million That You Don't Need a New Phone

Two years out of BCG, Hamza Iraqui was watching the Gulf throw away perfectly good devices. Phones replaced after one year. Laptops swapped at the first sign of a scratch. A regional culture of new, driven by fast retail, low awareness of alternatives, and almost no trusted infrastructure for buying second-hand.

He founded Revibe in Dubai in 2022 with co-founder Abdessamad Ben Zakour, who spent a decade in regional telecom consulting at Oliver Wyman. They were not building a classifieds site. They built a marketplace where every device passes a 50-point quality check, ships with a 12-month warranty, and is sold at 30 to 70 percent below the price of new.

The model is not charity. It is a commission business. Revibe connects vetted professional refurbishers with buyers across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Egypt. The company tracks seller performance and audits quality continuously. Hundreds of thousands of customers have already bought in.

Partech led the $17 million raise, joined by E& Capital, Burda Principal Investments, and EQNX. Total funding since founding now stands above $27 million across three rounds. Iraqui described the raise as a vote of confidence in the mission to offer devices that perform as good as new but cost far less and generate far less waste.

The capital will fund expansion into tablets, smartwatches, health devices, and TVs. Home appliances are next. Revibe is moving fast through consumer electronics categories one by one.

What Ben Zakour and Iraqui understood before most: trust, not price, is the real barrier in refurbished electronics. Solve trust with a rigorous operational system, and the market opens. Dubai is the right place to prove it because buyers here expect quality and will pay for it, but they also respond immediately when the economics are undeniable.

The obsession at Revibe is not sustainability for its own sake. It is the conviction that the next generation of consumers in emerging markets will build wealth in part by refusing to overpay for things that are already good enough.

Sources:
Gulf News: Dubai startup raises $17M
Wamda: Revibe lands $17 million
GEC Newswire: Revibe raises $17M