Hasan Abasi (36) has lived most of his life in northern Israel. He was born in Umm El-Fahm, grew up in Haifa and after a brief spell in Zurich as a software developer for Google, he gave up a promising career in Europe and returned to the city of his birth, close to his family. While Abasi left Zurich, he wanted to keep one thing he had grown used to there - the convenience of having food delivered to his home from restaurants. But such a pleasure was almost nonexistent five years ago in the Arab city where he lived.
Before the Covid pandemic in 2020, deliveries were an expensive business in Umm El Fahm. There are no street names, or exact addresses, and residents cannot always obtain credit cards and use cash.
Abasi rose to the challenge and in 2018 launched a restaurant and supermarket delivery app that is similar in interface and usability to competitors like Wolt, or Just Eat, but tailored to the unique needs of Arab cities in Israel. He called it HAAT, "bring" in Arabic.
"When I founded the company, there was disappointment in the family," Abasi tells "Globes" in an exclusive interview. "My father said to me: How can you leave a dream job and return to Umm al-Fahm to sell baguettes?" But Abasi didn't give up. At first, the app only operated in Arab society, in mixed cities like Nazareth, Akko, and Jerusalem. It then expanded to Jewish cities surrounded by Arab communities, such as Karmiel and Kochav Yair - and last year it also reached Haifa and will soon serve Kiryat Shmona. The platform, which allows customers to pay in cash, has become a major option in northern Israel. With each new city it enters, it has brought great competition on the prices of dishes for customers and the commissions for restaurants - and now it is also entering the Tel Aviv metropolitan region.
In the coming days, HAAT will launch its delivery services in the Jaffa area, and Abasi believes that this is an opening shot that will change the delivery scene in the region. "Jaffa is the bridge point between Haifa and Tel Aviv," he says, explaining the choice to start there. "It is similar to Haifa, but also to Tel Aviv, and in my opinion it is the right and strategic entry point to the center. Everything we learned in Haifa we can apply here, in the small area of Jaffa, and my goal is to reach all of Gush Dan. I believe that in 2026-27 the market will look different."
The main advantage of HAAT in Jaffa is firstly to offer an alternative to local businesses that have so far had difficulty working with Wolt and paying their restaurant fees. But Jaffa and Tel Aviv are not Nazareth and Taiba and HAAT’s success is not guaranteed. The startup graveyard is full of companies that tried to challenge Wolt on its home turf: Yango Delivery closed its operations, Gett’s food delivery service launched in 2020 didn’t really take off, and companies like Kwik and Avo ended up closing down.
Judging by HAAT’s Haifa launch, Jaffa residents are in for a long-term series of promotions and discounts. The company launched the Haifa market in April 2025, and eight months later, it beats Wolt on prices, mainly due to discounts on deliveries and absence of operating fees.
A "Globes" trial this week shows that an omelet sandwich from the Savta sandwich chain costs NIS 4 less with HAAT than Wolt, due to a commission that Wolt charged on small orders and handling fees; a Margherita pizza at Italiano restaurant was offered for sale on HAAT for NIS 60 instead of NIS 71 the full price on Wolt, due to a special promotion; at the Tzafririm restaurant, a difference of more than NIS 40 was recorded in favor of HAAT due to extras counted as separate portions by Wolt.
However, in markets where both companies have been operating for a long time, and residents no longer benefit from launch prices, it is difficult to identify significant price gaps. The prices of the meals and deliveries are generally the same, and the two companies run special promotions in competitive markets. For example, in Nazareth, where the companies have been operating as rivals for at least two years, you can find businesses where Wolt is more affordable.
Scarce resources, sky-high targets and support from Nvidia
In recent days, Abasi has been seen increasingly outside his home base in the north. In December, he spent several days in the streets of Tel Aviv and toured the alleys of Old Jaffa, the flea market and around Yafet Street. He visited restaurants, shawarma outlets and confectionery stores.
Abasi says, "The local market in Jaffa, like the entire Gush Dan region, needs to be ready for launch in countless aspects - operational, business and economic - and we are working on it now. Haifa was a leap for us from the periphery to the big cities, in terms of the number of businesses and the number of customers, and after we experience the area here, we will understand what the pain is, listen to the customers, see what the needs are and where there is satisfaction."
Abasi starts from a relatively modest, but strategic location. Jaffa, still in the familiar area of a mixed city, but with aspirations to expand deliveries to Tel Aviv as well. This is how he plans to hunt down Wolt, which has become the undisputed king of food deliveries. The Finnish app has gained a particularly dominant position in Israel, to the point that its status has been discussed in recent months by the Israel Competition Authority. Compared to Wolt, a wealthy company that raised almost $900 million before being sold to US company DoorDash for $2.8 billion, HAAT operates with few resources, relying mainly on its working capital. Since its founding five years ago, it has only raised $20 million, mainly from private investors, including Nvidia SVP and Israel site leader Amit Krig, Mellanox founder Eyal Waldman, and Krig's deputy in Israel, Ali Ayoub, who founded HAAT with Abasi.
Ayoub and Abasi met while working together at Google, and decided to leave the search giant to solve two significant problems that were not being addressed by other delivery apps at the time: navigating delivery in cities without infrastructure, where there is no organized address system, and accepting payment from customers who prefer to pay in cash rather than credit card.
Additional investors in the company are Sir Ronald Cohen, Yariv Gilat, Rafi Gidron and Gigi Levy-Weiss, as well as venture capital funds such as F2 and NFX. Abasi sees his lack of resources as an advantage.
"One of the mistakes that delivery companies made was that in 2017-2018, when money was cheap, people raised a ton of money and burned it left, right and center because it was not based on goals," he says. "It is precisely because of the lack of resources that we are forced to be very focused. The aim of the people leading the project is to build a company that does not burn money but knows how to put every dollar in the right place."
It is no coincidence that an Israeli company has not emerged to date that dominates the deliveries field. Abasi speaks of a difficult field that does not attract high-tech people, nor do players from around the world see Israel as an attractive arena. "The world of apps for the final consumer is less developed here, and players from abroad do not enter the country because of the wars and other changes that the country is going through," he explains. "So when a situation arises that one international player comes from abroad, they succeed. You have to be a crazy geek to succeed here in this field.On the one hand, be a first-rate tech person and on the other, a field person. Most of my friends prefer to live in their lab in the worlds of cyber and software, and it is difficult to create competition like we are introducing now."
Despite this, he is confident that HAAT can become the first Israeli success in the field of deliveries and even recreate the dream he had before the war, to expand overseas. In the meantime, he is maintaining a slow and cautious approach, which will not poke a finger in the eyes of competitors.
Ahead of the launch in Jaffa, HAAT plans to offer additional services to arrive more prepared, including a new partnership with Yango Deli, which will provide it with technology for monitoring store stocks, so that supermarkets and grocery stores can display only what is in stock on the website, as well as a new partnership with Israel Post, to allow the Israeli app to distribute packages to the customer's home. There is also a new round of capital raising for the company and has not yet been announced.
The competition for the central Israel market that may cut prices
He is familiar with central Israel. HAAT is already operating in several cities in the region like Kafr Kassem and Taibe but has not moved west of Road 6 and doesn’t even yet operate in big mixed Arab cities like Ramle and Lod.
"In my previous life, I worked at Google in Tel Aviv, but I'm from the north and don't know this city well enough. It does remind me of large European cities, also in the consumer sense, and at the same time it's different from the rest - it has its own charm. I'm curious to get to know it more deeply," he says.
Abasi is an Israeli entrepreneur, but his mannerisms are more typical of Intel (where he worked as an engineer) and Google, from where he came previously. You won't hear him say a bad word about the big rival, Wolt. "They do a good job, but I'm focused on what I do," he says, preferring to simply list the advantages: "We serve 50 regions and in most of them we're not the only player in the picture, but in the places where we launched the app, we lead with the largest market share. We know that the devil is mainly in the small details: longer operating hours, a larger order basket, a smaller minimum order, types of products that can't be found elsewhere. We also enable accessibility to diverse customers, which is difficult to find in other places, allow cash payments and provide free deliveries to hospitals and universities."
The reality of real competition for the consumer and food business owner, which is starting to be felt in Haifa and may soon be felt in the center too, has been felt by residents of Arab and mixed cities for several years in cities such as Nazareth, Taiba and Baqa al-Gharbiya.
HAAT was launched in Nazareth and Nof Hagalil in 2021, and Wolt entered there two years later. Wolt later also penetrated additional HAAT markets including Taibe, Qalanswa and Tira which it entered in May, and last month Jaljulia and Kafr Kassem. Last Tuesday, Wolt launched in Baqa al-Gharbiya. It also launched campaigns in Arab localities, which included discounts on delivery fees and discounts on restaurant commissions, with price reductions. Even if it is not certain that HAAT will be a cheaper alternative to Wolt, its entry into the city is likely to bring with it a series of promotions and discounts.
The average commission taken from restaurants that work with Wolt is 27% before VAT, while the average at HAAT is 23%, depending on the scope of the restaurant's activity and the average shopping basket. Delivery fees to the customer are generally similar: the average at HAAT ranges from NIS14 to 18, and at Wolt it is NIS 14, and there is also a limit of NIS 24. At HAAT, as an app that also serves remote villages, delivery fees can also reach more than NIS 30. At Wolt, fees are charged that are not charged by HAAT, such as an operating fee of up to NIS 5.9 for each order and a special fee for small orders that fall below the minimum order threshold. HAAT, however, charges the customer a special fee of NIS 5 for delivery in severe weather, as was the case during the stormy days earlier this week.
Food under fire: The opportunity created during the war
The war did not help Abasi. In Israel, HAAT was perceived as an Arab sector company and in the Arab world as an Israeli company. Thus, plans to expand to Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even to the cities of the Palestinian Authority were shelved. "When you are a player in the consumer products market, products that are sold to the end customer and not to organizations (B2C) you have no control over how you are labeled on the street. Although Israel has good relations with some of these countries, in the end it is not a product that is sold to governments," he says.
He is not enthusiastic about being characterized in Israel as an Arab-Muslim entrepreneur. "When I am interviewed, there are talkbacks about the product and who I am, but I am not excited about it, and prefer to look at the praise," Abasi says. "In the end, the company's success speaks for itself. The entrepreneur is Arab and the company is global. Sitting here in his office side by side are Yael, Sujood and Dima."
It's not just Abasi who doesn't make the distinction between sectors in Israeli society, neither do Iranian missiles. The missile that hit downtown Haifa, in the campaign against Iran, damaged the company's offices. "Even before that, my biggest fear was that my employees would be hit. We have couriers driving everywhere," he recalls. "Then it reached my home. When the missile fell near us, we had already gone down to the protected area. Luckily, it ended with slight earth shattering and part of the ceiling in the office falling in. It's not just physical damage, some people were afraid to continue working from the office."
The war not only caused damage to HAAT, it also helped the company expand in cities like Akko, Afula and Karmiel, at a time when it was difficult for residents, who were under frequent rocket fire, to leave their homes to buy food. Instead of focusing on geographic expansion, HAAT identified a business opportunity and added necessary services and products from supermarkets, restaurants, and medicine deliveries, computer games, and the option to pay in cash - and still use its digital wallet to buy virtual products such as: Netflix subscriptions.
After the guns fell silent, the company is now returning to the geographic expansion plan and is also daring to look overseas again. "There are many more countries to which we can bring value, Morocco is one of them, but there are also countries like Cyprus, Greece, Germany, and countries in Africa that do not have the payment infrastructures that we know in the West," Abasi explains the vision.
Didn’t want to be a doctor and the parents cut support
Abasi is the fourth of five children. His father is a sports teacher and his mother is a housewife who left school after junior high. His parents raised him to be a doctor, but when they realized he was actually interested in computers, they stopped supporting him financially. "I excelled in math as a child and was labelled as gifted. Everyone wanted me to study medicine, because that's what smart kids do in Arab society," he says. "I disappointed my parents by following my heart, going against expectations and choosing to specialize in computer science. I became a doctor at the Technion, but not a doctor of medicine, which is what my mother had hoped for."
Ultimately, Abasi says, the decision not to support him was a "great blessing" for him. He began working after-school hours at McDonald's and saved money to study computer science at the Technion. It ended with ten years of study at the prestigious institution and three degrees in computer science. Even today, when he is already a father of three and CEO of a growing startup, he finds time to teach courses at the Technion. "I have been teaching for half of my life, I started when I was 18 and today I am already 36. I really enjoy it thanks to my supportive family, headed by my wife, who allows me all this space."
For Abasi, his insistence on teaching is also his modest contribution to the effort to increase the integration of Arabs in the tech industry. "It is important for me to serve as a personal example," he says. "An example that it is possible to study exact sciences, reach the largest companies and establish new initiatives - that everything can be done. You need the municipalities and authorities to establish tech centers and support studies in the field, but most of all you need pioneers. In my opinion, HAAT is one of those pioneers who proves that it is possible to break the glass ceiling."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 1, 2026.
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