Djamel Mohand on Rocket Internet, Scaling Foodics to 30K Restaurants & Why Your Data Isn't AI-Ready

Today's guest is Djamel Mohand, a Rocket Internet alumnus who landed in Saudi Arabia over a decade ago, back when relocating to the Kingdom for tech was rather less fashionable than it is today. What was supposed to be a six-month stint turned into ten years of building businesses across the region, most notably as COO at Foodics, where he helped scale the restaurant management platform to over 30,000 restaurants across 25 countries. Earlier this year he stepped away to start something new: Governata, a Saudi-based data governance platform that just raised a $4 million seed round from investors including Joa Capital, Sanabil Accelerator by 500 Global, and Plug and Play. Data governance is not exactly the sexiest pitch in the world, and Djamel will be the first to admit it. But his thesis is essentially this: everyone is talking about AI adoption, but very few organisations have their data house in order to actually make it work. Governata is positioning itself as that foundational layer, the Arabic-first, Saudi-built platform designed to get enterprises AI-ready rather than just AI-curious. We get into the Rocket Internet origin story, what he learned scaling Foodics, and why the gap between having a data policy and actually implementing one is where the real opportunity lies. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: ----------------------------------------------- Thank you to the partners who make this possible: • Sarwa – An all-in-one investing and money-management platform. It brings together do-it-yourself trading in stocks, ETFs, crypto, and options with Sarwa Trade, hands-off investing with Sarwa Invest, and high-yield estimated returns with Sarwa Save. 👉 Register using this link to be eligible for a $200 bonus when you fund $5,000 across your Sarwa accounts within three months of signing up: https://www.sarwa.co/register?promoCo... Promo code: FWDSTART Sarwa is regulated by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority. All investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future results. ----------------------------------------------- Transcript: ----------------------------------------------- Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:   / jamienlane   Follow Jamie Lane on X: https://x.com/jamienlane Follow Djamel Mohand on LinkedIn:   / djam   Follow FWDstart on Instagram:   / fwdstart   Follow FWDstart on TikTok:   / fwdstart   Visit our Website: https://www.fwdstart.me/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe -----------------------------------------------