🚗💰 OUR FOUNDER OF THE MONTH — Every month, Founder of the Month looks at how a successful member of Egypt’s business or startup community got their big break, asks about their experiences running a company, and gets their advice for budding entrepreneurs. Speaking to us this week is Amr Allam (LinkedIn), co-founder and CEO of Biddex and chairman of Allam Automotive.
Amr Allam grew up on a showroom floor. His family has run automotive showrooms in Alexandria for years, moving Audi, Skoda, BMW, MG, and half a dozen other brands. Today, he’s CEO and co-founder of Biddex, an app-based marketplace that lets Egyptians browse, finance, and buy used cars entirely from their phones — built on the same industry knowledge his family spent decades accumulating, applied to a market he saw as ready for something new.
Allam trained as an architectural engineer, graduating in 2014, and started his own company, Allam Automotive, that same year, taking on brands across the Chinese, German, and wider international market. The experience gave him a close-up view of how Egyptians actually buy cars — and travel abroad convinced him there was a better way. “I found that the Egyptian market has no transparency — zero — when it comes to cars,” Allam tells EnterpriseAM.
Auction-and-financing systems were booming in the US and gaining ground in Dubai and Saudi. Egypt, he noticed, had nothing like it. “Everything was just your usual trading, normally going to a showroom,” he says, with no easy way to verify a car’s condition, arrange financing, or trust the process end to end.
…So he built the fix himself. Allam spent three and a half years developing Biddex with a fully in-house tech team, rather than outsourcing the build. “If anyone else develops it, they keep a retainer, you have to keep going back to them, and I wouldn’t truly own the project,” he says. The result, in his words, is less a listing site than an “ecosystem” — one that connects buyers, merchants, and banks in a single platform, managed the way a marketplace like Amazon is managed behind the scenes.
That same instinct extended to how Biddex runs day-to-day. The company employs close to 150 people across operations, sales, and tech — including its own in-house call center, a function most platforms its size would hand to an outside provider. “My direction is for our company to grow up at our hands, with the same team in-house,” Allam says, “so we don’t face any issues.”
Allam points to a specific moment as proof the concept had found its footing. A few months after Biddex’s January 2026 launch, he says, some of the market’s bigger names started reaching out on their own. “Every one of the big names wanted to enter,” he says. Nothing’s been signed yet, he’s careful to note — but he describes the interest as validation that Biddex had built something the market needed, not just something it could use.
The proof is in the traction that has followed. Biddex works with 150 merchants and lists around 2.5k cars at any given time, according to the company. It signed financing agreements with some of Egypt’s largest banks, including Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, which closed in December 2025 ahead of Biddex’s full public launch in January 2026.
Biddex says it now draws more than 3.1 mn site visits and 570k active users a month, with more than 120k app downloads, 35k replies, and 7 mn ad impressions monthly — numbers Allam points to as proof the model is working. “The number of downloads, the website visits — these are the most exciting things for me,” he says.
For Allam, though, the traffic numbers aren’t really the point — what matters to him is what they represent: people trusting a process they used to be wary of. He describes a buyer who once would have been intimidated walking into a showroom, unsure about financing or wary of being oversold, now completing the entire transaction from their phone. “That acceptance rate from the user is what matters to me,” he says. “It’s not just about someone liking the project.”
Biddex is entirely bootstrapped, with no outside investors — a point of pride for Allam, who sees it as proof the company is his to build on his own terms, at his own pace. The ambition is sized to match. Allam says capturing 10% of Egypt’s total used-car market would be “super wow” — and getting all 6k of the country’s merchants onto the platform is less of a stretch goal than an inevitability in his telling: “It’s a must, it’s not an option. I have to reach all of them.”
Ask him what building Biddex has cost him personally, and Allam doesn’t dress it up. “Work-life balance is not something I have right now,” he says. Running Biddex alongside Allam Automotive, he says, doesn’t feel like juggling two jobs so much as one continuous one.
What he’d change about the industry comes down to one word: credibility. Allam describes a used-car market that has long struggled with trust — marked by undisclosed accident histories, inconsistent inspections, and financing that’s hard to access or understand. He positions Biddex as the platform built to close that gap through verified vehicle condition, transparent financing, and direct delivery to the buyer’s door. “We created a transformation,” he says.
His advice to founders starting out: It all comes down to passion. “How much passion do you have for what you are doing?” he says. “Everything else — the team, the funding, the hard days — is easier to get through if that part is real.”
