Eight startups have reached the final phase of the Agrytech Accelerator Batch 3. Berytech reached out to hear from the founders themselves about their journey in the program so far.
Karya is an online platform offering experiential touristic experiences via local rural small-scale producers. Karya is here to put the small-scale producers into relevance, create an activity from their crafts and offer these activities to curious tourists who would like to try something new for a change.
According to co-founders Serge Atallah, Michel Feghaly and Nicolas Gholam, “Karya started as a platform to expose existing restaurants, guesthouses, and recreational activities throughout rural Lebanon. Once we joined Berytech’s Agrytech Accelerator Program, we were hoping to create a shift in our value proposition to capitalize and create revenue from the service we are providing. Given that this service solves 2 issues, more income to smallholders and new approach to tourism.
Since then, we have shifted our value proposition to sell only experiences, and then optimize these experiences into food and/or rooms. We have also finalized the phone application and made it available. We also have developed understanding on the countries of the Mediterranean basin in which we want to scale. One of our key success factors is the structured way in which we are now working that affected more efficiently our decision making. But overall, our shift to only selling experience after 1 year of acting as the yellow pages of rural tourism has to be our greatest achievement.
After the economic crisis, Covid-19 and the Beirut blast our mission persists. Everything else has either been slow or on hold. We prefer not to elaborate on this for the time being as we are still picking up the pieces of how to move forward after the explosion. We are now seriously thinking of launching Karya overseas instead of launching it here and then scaling it. However, we still need to operate in the Lebanese market for a proper validation.”
Learn more about Berytech’s Agrytech Accelerator program.
