Meyahh Uses AI to Clear the Pipeline for SMEs in Water Treatment

Mohamed Mokhlef, an industrial engineer by trade, has been in the water treatment industry for more than a decade. Starting out in the family business, IWTE - a regional water treatment engineering and solutions company - Mokhlef led the firm from having only a dozen employees to now having over 50, multiplying its revenue tenfold. But that journey also led him to one key question.

“I had always wondered: why don’t the small companies in this industry ever transform into large corporations?” Mokhlef tells StartupScene. In Egypt, Mokhlef says the industry is composed of a few large multinationals and many smaller SMEs that struggle to procure manufactured inputs at the same price point because they do not benefit from economies of scale. So, along with co-founder and CTO Samah Abdullah, Mokhlef founded Meyahh in 2024 to balance the equation in favour of SMEs and the industry as a whole.

At its core, Meyahh is a digital B2B platform that connects suppliers and manufacturers in the water treatment industry with service providers and contractors (such as IWTE) that work on projects concerning everything from hospitals to factories and farms. Though registered in the UAE, most of Meyahh’s operations are in Egypt, though so far they have also acquired clients in Saudi Arabia, Rwanda and the UAE.

“Quantity-wise, SMEs number much more than the big corporates,” Mokhlef explains, “but the MNCs have huge purchasing power over the manufacturers. So Meyahh comes in here to solve this problem.”

For example, when a large contractor purchases 100 water pumps, they obtain them at a much better price than a smaller contractor purchasing only five. But through Meyahh’s app, 20 different SMEs, each purchasing five pumps, could get access to the same price point as the large corporation, and therefore improve their competitiveness in the market. And that’s only one of the benefits for users of Meyahh’s platform.

“Using AI, our app provides insights for our users and their needs, for example, showing SMEs different verified suppliers and helping them avoid subpar components,” says Mokhlef. In the hands of a company’s procurement officer, the app also delivers price reductions for the company through faster quote comparisons and accelerates the efficiency of the procurement process, saving hundreds of hours of effort.

On the other side, for manufacturers and suppliers in the industry (most of whom are located outside the MENA region), Meyahh’s app helps them gain access to more small and medium-sized customers who, as Mokhlef points out, far outnumber the large MNCs in the field. In exchange, Meyahh charges an annual subscription fee to suppliers, and takes between a 1% and 10% commission on transactions depending on size: the larger the transaction, the smaller the percentage. “We want to avoid having companies make the big transactions off the app, and only the small transactions inside it.”

The biggest challenge, however, is getting an industry such as this one to go digital. “We’re the first startup to try something like this, so we’re trying to change the behaviour of a very traditional industry,” says Mokhlef. “We’re still in the stage of trying to educate the market. We don’t just want companies to get on the app, but also stay there.”

To that end, Meyahh’s team offers offline support that extends beyond the app. “If someone comes to us with an additional request, we won’t wait until we’ve incorporated it into the software.” In the long term, however, the goal is to make the app entirely automated.

More broadly, Meyahh’s target is to keep expanding the platform and acquire more customers throughout the Middle East and Africa. With a target of 10 million dollars in transactions on the platform per year by 2029, Meyahh’s success would mean not only its own profitability, but an AI transformation throughout the entire water treatment industry.