Our mission
Give Africa's commodity buyers the tools to compete on equal terms.
Most of the world's grain moves through a small number of large traders. They have the systems, the relationships and the track record. Smaller buyers in East Africa do not.
Hakika is building the infrastructure that lets a miller in Mombasa or Nairobi prove it is reliable, join a vessel with others, and pay a price that reflects its performance rather than the average risk of the market.
We start with GroupBuy, a structured way to share a vessel, prove reliability and earn better terms over time.
The tools we are building
Our story
Mahan Tooti spent years trading grain at Viterra and Bunge. Sitting at a desk in Rotterdam, he kept noticing the same thing: African buyers were paying vastly higher prices for the same commodities, and the market gave them almost no visibility into why.
Curiosity is the mother of all invention. So he packed his bags and went to find out for himself; spending three months on the ground in East Africa, talking to millers, suppliers, banks and terminal operators. What he found was not a mystery. It was a missing layer of infrastructure: no shared records, no way to prove reliability, no way to earn better terms over time.
That field trip became Hakika. Built on what he saw, and on the conviction that the problem is solvable.
The team
Mahan built his career at Viterra and Bunge, across trading, trade research, operations, market risk, credit risk and trade finance. He holds a Masters degree in Supply Chain Management from Erasmus University and a Bachelors degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Delft. He leads Hakika's work with millers, suppliers, terminals and banks, and divides his time between Rotterdam and Mombasa.
- Grain trading, contracts and supplier relationships
- Trade finance, credit risk and transaction economics
- Shipping, logistics and vessel execution
Saeed has worked for some of the large multinationals, among them the navigation company TomTom and EPAM Systems, the NYSE-listed technology consultancy. He has built his own software development and consultancy firm, with offices in Amsterdam, Valencia and Milan, and sold it. Today he works with founders who have big ambitions, offering hands-on technical support, seed investment and business development guidance in a down-to-earth way. At Hakika he is the technologist and an investor, and leads the design of the platform.
We are adding to this team. See Join us.
What we believe
- Trust should be earned by performance and proven by records.
- Smaller buyers deserve the same infrastructure as large ones.
- Collective action works when the rules are clear and the data is shared.
- Finance should price individual risk, not average risk.
- Knowledge should be passed on.
What Hakika is not
Hakika is not a trader. We do not buy or sell grain. We do not hold inventory, take price risk or act as a principal in any transaction. We are infrastructure: a platform that lets buyers, suppliers and banks transact with better information and lower coordination costs.
We are based between Rotterdam and Mombasa, with our first GroupBuy focused on East Africa.