Egyptian B2B e-commerce start-up Capiter, last year raised a $33 million series A round to the excitement of its board members when it was only one-year old. But this year the founders have been fired by the same board for funds mismanagement and aloofness.
The board members unanimously fired the startup’s cofounders and brothers, Mahmoud Nouh and Ahmed Nouh, citing their aloofness from the business and funds mismanagement among several other reasons.
In an official press release, Capiter’s board of directors declared that Mahmoud and Ahmed, the CEO and COO of the company, were immediately fired.
They also appointed Majid El Ghazouli, Capiter’s CFO, as interim CEO until “the Nouh brothers return and allay the concerns of stakeholders.”
It didn’t seem like much when Capiter secretly laid off about 100 employees between June and July this year. What people didn’t know was that the company was quietly going broke.
According to TechCrunch, Capiter was having problems onboarding new merchants into its platform, its management was super poor, and it barely had operational cash for more than a month left.
These claims began to mirror reality when, in September, exactly when the sources had said the start-up would be flat broke, Capiter’s investors began to race towards an exit by selling the business or doing a merger.
But such moves required an x-ray into the company’s structure and pocket. The founders needed to be there to ensure the process worked, but according to the investors, that was when the brothers stopped responding to board directors or shareholders.
Meanwhile, the CEO, Mahmoud Nouh, has denied that any of this was happening, and maintained that he and his brother had not received any notice of dismissal.
