The problem
For Syrians and refugees, getting a document into or out of Syria was slow, expensive or impossible: international couriers charged Middle East premiums or skipped the routes entirely, while families had urgent paperwork — IDs, certificates, legal files — with no delivery option.
How it works
Founded in 2018 by four Syrian refugees — Azhar Almadani and Zahi Almadani alongside co-founders Rasheed and Bilal — and incubated in Erbil and Istanbul, Shiffer was a peer-to-peer logistics platform for express shipping. Senders listed documents; the iOS app matched them with travellers already flying those routes, who carried the documents for a fee — cutting both cost and transit time versus legacy couriers, and, the founders noted, trimming the carbon footprint of big-carrier alternatives.
Pain points
Prohibitive courier pricing, Syria routes unserved by major carriers, and a refugee population whose most urgent needs were envelopes, not parcels.
Business model
Crowdsourced courier fees: Shiffer took its margin on peer-to-peer document shipments priced well below DHL-style alternatives, starting with documents in beta before any parcel expansion.
Challenges
The model depended entirely on people moving freely across borders. Covid-era global travel shutdowns, restricted freedom of movement, and the friction of scaling a trust-based crowdsourced network proved fatal — the app shut down in 2021.
Funding
- No institutional round is publicly documented. Shiffer won competition prizes instead: the early-stage track at the Jusoor/SPARK Startup Roadshow in Erbil (Oct 2018), a $1,000 people’s-choice prize at Jusoor’s entrepreneurship competition, and first prize at the SPARK Ignite finals in Amsterdam (Nov 2018).
Latest — November 2018
On 28 November 2018 Shiffer won first prize at the Startup Roadshow finals at the SPARK Ignite conference in Amsterdam, closing a run that began with its Erbil roadshow victory weeks earlier. The startup did not survive the pandemic travel freeze and shut down in 2021.