Serial entrepreneur Elsa Aoun gets profiled

2019

Strategy& alumni are a creative bunch and often are drawn to found their own startups. A recent blog post on the website of technological pole Berytech profiles Elsa Aoun, co-founder of the websites Ounousa and Sohati, and the YouTube channel Loolia. The article describes how Elsa’s content production venture began with Ounousa, when she and her husband, Wassim Kari (also a Strategy& alum), were in grad school and identified “a lack of Arabic-speaking content on the web and decided to tackle the problem.” Ounousa’s target audience is women, and it is the first online Arabic-language magazine for women.

The serial entrepreneurs went on to identify a gap in the provision of Arabic-language medical content for patients so they created Sohati (which was supported by Strategy& alum Antoun Halabi as a business angel and board advisor). And when the couple noticed the growing demand for video content and the fact that the MENA region was a huge user of social media and a voracious consumer of video content, Loolia a YouTube channel offering beauty and fashion content for young women was born. Wassim and Elsa co-founded Loolia with Strategy& alums Eric Abi Younes and Dalia Chartouni. Mansour Mansour, also an alum of Strategy&, and Hicham Fadel, Partner at Strategy&, were among the first believers in the concept and acted as angel investors from the start.

The profile goes on to describe Elsa’s journey “from content production to e-commerce, on a path of perpetual search for innovation” and details the steps she and Wassim took to arrive at their current success, including raising US$4 million in funding rounds. According to the profile, Elsa and her team of 25 full-time and freelance writers and producers “reach a vast audience across the MENA region, with 17 million followers on Facebook for the Ounousa page, 10 million for the Sohati page, and 1.5 million subscribers to Loolia’s YouTube channel.” Their latest ventures are Looliacloset.com, an influencer-based e-destination for beauty and fashion; and Sohaticare.com, an online parapharmacy offering both the service and the advice of a team of pharmacists on call.

Berytech, the first technopole in Lebanon, provides a supportive environment for the creation and development of startups, offering services such as incubation, business support, counseling, funding, networking, and company hosting, among other things. Full disclosure: In 2014, Berytech invested $1.5 million in Ounousa.