Akedly: The Egyptian SaaS Startup Taking OTPs Beyond SMS

For this installment of NextGen, our series spotlighting emerging entrepreneurs shaping the region's startup ecosystem, we spoke with Hana Younis, co-founder and COO of Akedly, an Egyptian AaaS platform rethinking how businesses authenticate users across MENA.

For most users, an OTP is a six-digit inconvenience. For businesses, it's the point where months of customer acquisition can disappear.

Every failed authentication is a potential customer lost before they even get through the door. Despite investing heavily to acquire users, many businesses still rely on authentication systems that quietly leak conversions at the very first touchpoint.

That's the problem Akedly is solving.

Founded by Hana Younis, Muhad Samir and Abdelrahman Salahelden, Akedly is an authentication platform that’s reimagining how one-time passwords are delivered. Instead of relying on SMS, which is often expensive, unreliable and vulnerable to fraud, the platform routes authentication requests through WhatsApp first, Telegram second, and only falls back to SMS when necessary.

The idea came from the founders' own experience. While building previous startups, they repeatedly ran into OTP failures when trying to demo products to investors. After cycling through provider after provider without finding one they could trust, they decided to build the solution themselves.

"We started because we couldn't reliably showcase product demos to investors. After going through so many OTP providers, we reached a point where we asked ourselves: why not build it ourselves?"

What began in February 2025 as a side project was intentionally simple: a WhatsApp account sending OTPs with a SIM card acting as an SMS backup. At the time, Samir was completing military service, Salahelden was juggling other ventures and Younis was finishing her final semester at university. It wasn't meant to become a company, only a proof of concept to see whether anyone would pay for a better authentication experience.

Today, Akedly powers authentication for more than 95 companies across Egypt, the GCC and wider MENA, growing almost entirely through word of mouth.

The team quickly realised businesses weren't just overpaying for OTPs, they had begun treating failure as part of the cost of scaling. Failed SMS deliveries, repeated resend requests and customer complaints had become accepted as unavoidable, prompting the founders to question why authentication depended so heavily on telecom infrastructure in the first place.

With WhatsApp and Telegram already dominating communication across MENA, Akedly prioritises those channels before falling back to SMS, improving delivery rates while significantly reducing international authentication costs.

It also tackles one of authentication's most expensive blind spots: SMS fraud. Attackers frequently flood OTP systems with fake requests, leaving businesses with inflated messaging bills before genuine users ever log in. Rather than charging for every message sent, Akedly only charges for successful authentications, with pricing starting from EGP 0.50 per successful verification.

"We only charge when our customers actually get value. If authentication fails, no one wins - not the business, not the user, and certainly not us. That's why we built our pricing around successful authentications rather than messages sent. We wanted our incentives to be aligned with our customers' success, not with failed deliveries or spikes in fraudulent traffic."

That value-first philosophy also shapes the company's fraud prevention strategy. Its customers are primarily fintechs, ticketing platforms and other high-volume digital businesses, where a failed OTP can derail registration, onboarding or payment before users ever experience the product.

Convincing businesses to move beyond SMS proved harder than building the technology itself. The challenge wasn't technical, but behavioural: showing companies that users would naturally embrace WhatsApp and Telegram if it meant faster, more reliable authentication.

Now, Akedly is looking beyond OTPs. Its roadmap includes passkeys, business messaging services and deeper integrations with providers including Firebase, Twilio and Cequens, giving businesses a single platform to manage the entire authentication journey.

"We want to become MENA's authentication layer - the platform businesses plug into once and never have to think about again."