In this interview segment, Aziz Alghunaim introduces Nash, a company whose mission is to simplify reliable local delivery for businesses. Nash provides a comprehensive software stack covering eligibility, pricing, route optimization, live tracking, operations, and customer notifications. This stack sits atop a marketplace of over 500 delivery providers who execute the deliveries. Nash sells its platform to point‑of‑sale systems, marketplaces, and individual merchants, enabling them to offer first‑class delivery experiences without building their own logistics. The conversation also touches on the industry shift away from companies hiring their own drivers toward integrating with delivery APIs like Nash’s.
All right, so let's talk Nash. That is easy. Tell us about Nash and maybe a little bit about you too as well.
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start off just to introduce everyone to Nash. Our mission in Nash is to make it easy for any business to offer reliable local delivery. And we do this by building all the software components that businesses need to offer this to their end consumer. This starts from eligibility, pricing, route optimization, live tracking, operations, customer notifications. It's a complex stack that a business needs to actually compete and offer reliable delivery. We build all these software components, and all of this sits on top of a marketplace with more than 500 delivery providers that actually go and execute these jobs. And then we basically sell this software to platforms. So point-of-sale systems that want to offer delivery as a first-class experience. We sell this to marketplaces. So marketplaces that create transactions that they choose to want to facilitate delivery for them would use Nash. And we sell that directly to merchants as well that have the ability to integrate that into their tech stacks. So that's what we do at Nash.
And well, and I was going to ask, by the way, I mean, there was a period where every company that wanted to do delivery would just go try to hire their own drivers instead of integrating with an API like yours. And why did that stop? Why did people stop doing that?
Maybe in the founding story. So I started Nash with Mahmoud, my co-founder, and I've known him since high school. We did science fairs in LA here together actually. And then we were classmates at MIT. Prior to Nash, Mahmoud had a gig work company and he was running a gig work company. And myself, prior to Nash, I started a marketplace for bilinguals to volunteer as translators for humanitarian organizations. And we kind of grew that marketplace to be the largest organized translator community. And today, every large NGO uses that to get access to translation. And then when COVID hit, Mahmoud and I kind of came together and there was this surge in demand for delivery, but there was a giant gap in the market where on the demand side, they lacked the ability to scale reliable supply. So, if you hire your own drivers, all of a sudden recruiting was a giant challenge. You could not figure out how to scale it. And if you work with a marketplace or a singular third-party provider, then you are entirely limited to their ability to offer that service to you. And then on the supply side, what we saw during that period is different supply networks were working at completely different utilizations. So, the supply network that was doing pizza would peak at dinnertime, but the supply network that did pharmacies and florists and retail would peak in the morning. And these different utilization peaks were just gone unutilized. So, when we saw a surge in demand in the market in COVID, The gaps became very, very clear. And our biggest thesis around starting Nash then, and Mahmoud's experience running that gig work community and me starting a marketplace before, is our thesis is a marketplace can actually optimize these inefficiencies. So, the big thesis was how do we use a marketplace dynamic to optimize this across the entire market where a merchant now can run at the optimal level. But at the same time, the providers end up with a more optimal network utilization.
