Founder of the Week: Amr Gamal on Building Egypt's Largest Fleet Payment Network
Enterprise AM profiles Amr Gamal — the ex-McKinsey, P&G, and Vodafone operator who co-founded Octane in 2022 and built it into Egypt's largest fleet payment network inside two years.
Read the full article on Enterprise AM →From Corporate Strategy to Fleet Fintech
Amr Gamal spent a decade moving between some of the world's most demanding operational environments — McKinsey & Company, Procter & Gamble, and Vodafone — before identifying the gap that would become Octane. The insight was simple but the implications were large: Egypt's commercial fleet sector, which manages hundreds of thousands of vehicles and billions of pounds in annual operating spend, had no reliable digital infrastructure for the most basic transaction in its daily operations — paying for fuel.
The Co-Founding Decision
Gamal co-founded Octane with Ziad El Adawy, whose 15+ years at Shell, BG Group, Air Liquide, and Honeywell gave the founding team direct experience with fleet operations from the energy and enterprise side. Together, they built a founding thesis around the specific friction points they had both observed: cash-based fuel payment, paper receipt reconciliation, and the near-impossibility of catching fraud without a digital audit trail. Octane was their answer.
Building the Network
The hardest part of building Octane, according to Gamal, was not the technology — it was the network. Getting 2,400 fuel stations to integrate with the platform required direct commercial relationships with seven fuel companies, infrastructure partnerships, and enough early corporate clients to demonstrate real transaction volume. 'The product is only as good as the network,' Gamal told Enterprise AM. 'If a driver can't use it at the stations on their route, they won't use it at all.'
What Comes Next
With the fuel payment network established and the EGP 1 billion milestone behind them, Gamal described an expansion roadmap built around closing every remaining category of fleet spend. Maintenance authorization, consumables procurement, and toll payment digitization — each representing a market segment where cash and paper still dominate, and where Octane's NFC infrastructure and closed-loop wallet can replicate what it has already done for fuel.