Influencer marketing has gone from fringe experiment to always-on acquisition channel. Industry forecasts estimate the global influencer marketing market at around $30-31 billion in 2025 with continued double digit growth that could push it past $100 billion by 2030, driven by adoption of digital channels and data driven tools.
MENA is on the same curve. Estimates value the influencer marketing industry in the Middle East at around $970 million in 2025, with earlier industry reports similarly valuing it around $1.3 billion, reflecting strong growth in brand investment on social channels. The wider Middle East advertising market is also expanding, from about $8.5 billion in 2025 to more than $12 billion by 2033, driven by this same shift toward digital and creators. Yet behind this growth, execution remains surprisingly manual. Most campaigns in Morocco, MENA, and much of Africa still run through a patchwork of spreadsheets, WhatsApp chats, manual contracts, and screenshot-based reporting. Brands struggle to prove ROI. Creators struggle to access recurring, fairly priced work. Agencies struggle to scale without simply adding more people. What’s missing is infrastructure. We invested in HypeoAi because we believe it can become the AI-native operating system for this emerging creator economy across MENA and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Fast-Growing Spend, Low Operational Maturity
Despite the size and growth of the market, the way influencer campaigns are managed in Morocco, MENA, and much of Africa is still largely manual:
- Campaigns are stitched together across spreadsheets, WhatsApp threads, email chains, and one-off creator contracts.
- Creator selection is often based on visibility and gut feel, not audience data, engagement quality, or historic ROI.
- Reporting is retrofitted from screenshots and vanity metrics rather than real-time dashboards or conversion data.
- Payments, invoices, and tax paperwork are handled piecemeal, with little standardisation across markets or creators.
This stands in stark contrast to the broader digital landscape. The Morocco online advertising market alone sits in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Middle East ad market is forecast to grow steadily over the decade. At the same time, MENA has some of the highest social media usage and mobile penetration rates in the world. Spend and attention have moved to creators, but the tooling hasn’t caught up. That gap between fast-growing budgets and low operational maturity is exactly where we believe HypeoAi can create durable, infrastructure-level value.
Hypeo as Infrastructure, Not Just a Tool
HypeoAi is building a full-stack, AI-powered platform that handles the entire lifecycle of an influencer campaign - from brief to payment.
Key capabilities:
- AI assisted campaign brief and content creation
- Smart creator discovery and matching
- Centralised workflow for communication and approvals
- Performance dashboards and reporting
- Integrated payments & compliance
Hypeo isn’t just another marketplace. It’s building the infrastructure rails that make influencer marketing in the region predictable, measurable, and repeatable.
Stronger Signals Than a Typical Pre-Seed
Even before full commercial launch, Hypeo has assembled the kind of early proof that gives us conviction at pre-seed:
- Commercial validation
- 18 brands with signed LOIs and purchase orders
- $34k+ in pre-committed subscription revenue, contingent on platform go-live.
- Platform readiness & supply-side depth
- 60,000+ influencers profiled in anticipation of onboarding, giving the platform immediate liquidity on the supply side.
- A working proof-of-concept, with $120k already invested in product and infrastructure.
Underneath these signals is a simple, scalable business model:
- SaaS subscriptions
- Take rate on campaign budgets
This combination of early demand, supply preparedness, and a clear monetisation model is what gives us confidence that Hypeo can compound quickly once the platform is fully live.
Why This Team, and Why With Madica
We start with a simple question: is this the right team to solve this problem at scale? With Hypeo, our conviction begins with the founder–market fit.
Meriam Bessa (Founder & CEO) has deep roots in the Moroccan and wider MENA marketing ecosystem. Before Hypeo, she built and scaled a communications agency to around $4M in annual GMV, managing over 40 active brand accounts. Her turning point came in early 2023, when her agency lost one of its largest multinational clients- not because of creativity or client relationships, but because the team was still relying on manual processes, fragmented workflows, and limited KPI tracking. That experience crystallised a problem she had felt for years: the influencer industry in MENA was simply too big, too fast-moving, and too complex to be managed on spreadsheets and WhatsApp.
Hypeo is the product of that lived frustration. Meriam had watched brands struggle to choose creators objectively, agencies hit scale ceilings, and creators remain undervalued because decisions were driven by human bandwidth instead of data. Her insight was clear: AI could solve what humans couldn’t scale - intelligent matching, automated workflows, predictive performance, and transparent KPIs.
Alongside Meriam, Salah Eddine Mimouni (Co-founder & COO) brings a complementary skill set on the execution side. Salah is a serial entrepreneur with prior ventures in digital media and SaaS and deep, hands-on experience in go-to-market, product ops, and the creative industries. He has also worked as a digital marketing instructor, giving him a structured, process-driven approach to scaling teams and systems. At Hypeo, Salah focuses on turning product capability into commercial traction, overseeing operations, early GTM, and customer success.
The founding pair is supported by a lean but high-calibre product and engineering bench, with full-time senior engineers and specialist AI/data support.
From Fragmented Campaigns to Regional Rails
Meriam and Salah aren’t just building another marketing tool; they’re laying down the infrastructure rails for how brands, agencies, and creators collaborate across MENA and Francophone Africa. If they succeed, influencer campaigns in the region will look very different: smarter targeting, clearer pricing, cleaner workflows, and measurable ROI as the norm rather than the exception. That is the future we’re backing. We’re proud to partner with the Hypeo team at this early stage and to support them as they move from validated thesis and early commitments to full commercial launch, regional expansion, and ultimately, category leadership in AI-powered influencer marketing.
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