Charikaty: Morocco’s First Fully Digital Platform for Company Creation

For this edition of Next Gen - our series spotlighting emerging startups across the region - we take a closer look at Charikaty, a startup reimagining how businesses are built and managed in Morocco. Founded in 2024 by Amr Mouaqit and Driss Sijelmassi, Charikaty is Morocco’s first fully digital legaltech platform for company formation and business lifecycle services.

Charikaty’s story begins with Mouaqit’s personal journey. After studying law in the United Kingdom, he returned to Morocco and began working at law firms, where he experienced, firsthand, the bureaucratic friction that defines company formation in many emerging markets.

“The idea came from frustration,” Mouaqit explains. “Starting a company shouldn’t feel like navigating a maze of lawyers, notaries, accountants and government offices.”

What he saw was a system dependent on physical visits, paper files and disconnected institutions. Entrepreneurs were forced to coordinate between courts, tax authorities, banks and notaries, often through slow and opaque processes. The inefficiency was not only costly, but discouraging - pushing many founders toward informal entrepreneurship.

Charikaty raised $150,000 (MAD 1.5 million) during Season 3 of Qui Veut Investir Dans Mon Projet? - the local adaptation of Shark Tank - securing backing from Ilan Benhaim, co-founder of venture capital firm Global Founders Capital, and prominent Moroccan investor, Karim Amor, Managing Partner at Akwa Group. The company has also participated in the Plug and Play accelerator programme, strengthening its investor network and sharpening its regional expansion strategy.

Eliminating Bureaucratic Friction

Charikaty’s core thesis is simple: bureaucracy should not be a barrier to entrepreneurship.

In markets like Morocco, the process of incorporating a company remains heavily administrative and fragmented. Despite growing digitisation efforts by governments (including the rollout of online business registration portals, digital tax filing systems, and the expansion of electronic commercial registry services), there has been no fully integrated, end-to-end platform that simplifies the journey for founders.

“Company creation isn’t the business,” Mouaqit says. “It’s the entry point. Every company you create becomes a long-term customer.”

Rather than viewing incorporation as a one-time transaction, Charikaty treats it as the beginning of a lifecycle relationship. Once a business is formed, the platform continues to serve as infrastructure - offering registered agent and virtual address services, accounting and tax compliance packages, company modifications, trademark registration, and a legal templates marketplace for contracts and HR documentation.

The result is a recurring, software-led model designed to centralise legal and administrative needs in one place.

A Legal Operating System for SMEs

Charikaty describes itself as a comprehensive platform for entrepreneurs. After launch, founders can manage capital changes, partner updates, address modifications and regulatory compliance directly through the platform. The aim is to reduce dependency on fragmented offline networks and replace them with structured, trackable digital processes.

Global platforms like LegalZoom have proven that company formation can scale in digitised economies. Mouaqit, however, believes the larger structural opportunity lies in emerging markets. “The real opportunity is bigger where inefficiency is the norm,” he says. “No one has built the infrastructure layer yet.”

By embedding jurists within a technology-first workflow, Charikaty ensures legal quality while maintaining operational efficiency - an approach Mouaqit believes differentiates it from traditional law firms and basic online filing services.

Targeting Founders and Building Long-Term Relationships

Charikaty serves three primary customer segments. The first includes individual founders and first-time entrepreneurs in Morocco and within the Moroccan diaspora. The second consists of existing SMEs requiring ongoing services such as compliance, accounting and company modifications. The third includes ecosystem partners such as incubators, fintechs, banks and coworking spaces that integrate Charikaty as their default legal onboarding channel.

While the parent customer in traditional education startups might differ from the end user, in Charikaty’s case the founder is both a decision-maker and a long-term client.

Bridging the 'Digital Trust' Gap

Despite government-led digitisation reforms in Morocco, adoption remains a behavioural challenge. Many entrepreneurs still rely on in-person interactions and trust-based relationships developed over years. “The challenge isn’t just building the technology,” Mouaqit says. “It’s earning digital trust.”

Convincing founders that an online platform can be faster, more transparent and more reliable than traditional intermediaries remains Charikaty’s most persistent challenge. As the company prepares for international expansion, with Egypt identified as a priority market, scaling technical leadership and strengthening engineering capacity are also immediate priorities.

Defining Success Through Infrastructure

For Charikaty, success is measured less by short-term transactions and more by long-term infrastructure impact. The founders envision a future where entrepreneurs across emerging markets default to software-driven legal systems rather than fragmented manual processes.

“In five years, we want to be the default legal infrastructure for SMEs across multiple emerging markets,” Mouaqit says. “We want to do for legal and administrative services what fintech did for payments - make it simple, fast and software-driven.”

By 2030, the company aims to operate in at least three to four countries, positioning itself as a category-defining platform for SME legal operations.