Curated collection
The 2025 Watchlist: After the Forecast
Four founders selected before the year unfolded, now preserved in complete records that can be tested against the original thesis.
A watchlist is useful only if the archive returns to it. This collection connects the original December 2024 forecast to full founder profiles, company records, sources, and long-form case files on Nour Khrais, Amira Yahyaoui, Dare Okoudjou, and Karim Atiyeh.
- Founders
- 4
- Case files
- 4
- Context
- 3
The reading route
Follow the argument through the records.
01Before the App Store, There Was a Carrier ContractMaysalward began when mobile games crossed a chain of manufacturers, telecom operators, handsets, and languages before they could reach a player. Nour Khrais built the studio—and helped build the ecosystem it needed to survive.Read 14 min 02The Form Is Never Just a FormBefore Mos, Amira Yahyaoui built tools that let Tunisians see government. Then she encountered American college aid: another high-stakes system whose complexity decides who receives opportunity.Read 15 min 03The Network Beneath the TransactionA mobile wallet can transform life inside one network and stop at its border. Dare Okoudjou built MFS Africa—now Onafriq—to connect the disconnected systems underneath African payments.Read 16 min 04The Finance Company That Promised Less SpendingCorporate-card companies earn when customers spend. Karim Atiyeh and his co-founders built Ramp around the opposite promise—and then had to prove that automation could preserve control while moving faster.Read 15 min
Founder Case Files
Maysalward / Amman, JordanNour KhraisKhrais built through the pre-app-store era, when a mobile game had to survive handset fragmentation, telecommunications distribution, and a regional talent market that barely existed.Mos / San Francisco, United StatesAmira YahyaouiYahyaoui carried a systems-accountability practice from post-revolution Tunisia into the maze of American college aid, building tools intended to make institutional money legible to students.Onafriq / Pan-AfricanDare OkoudjouOkoudjou has spent more than fifteen years connecting fragmented wallets, banks, cards, remittance providers, and merchants into a network intended to make value move across African borders.Ramp / New York, United StatesKarim AtiyehAtiyeh helped turn the lessons of consumer-finance startup Paribus into a finance platform built around an unusual promise: the vendor should help its customers spend less.
Context from Field Notes
The 2025 Watchlist: Before the Outcomes Were KnownThe original Chai & Code 2025 founder watchlist, preserved as a forecast and corrected where the archived copy paired founders with the wrong companies.Global Startups Beyond the Silicon Valley PlaybookStartup methods travel more easily than the infrastructure assumptions embedded inside them.The Geography of InnovationRemote work changed access, but place still shapes capital, talent, networks, customers, and the knowledge a company begins with.