Why I built Ziko

I have spent enough time in the back seats of ride hailing cars to notice a pattern. Ask a driver how the job is going and the conversation turns to the cut. The app takes something like 20 percent of every fare before the driver sees a cent of it. I heard it so often it stopped feeling like a complaint and started feeling like a fact everyone had agreed to live with. I never agreed to it. That frustration is the entire reason Ziko exists.

The math we changed

Once I decided to build a ride hailing app for Syria, the commission was not a detail to sort out later. It was the starting point. Ziko charges drivers zero percent commission, not a lower rate, not an introductory offer that creeps back up. Zero. Drivers keep 100 percent of every fare, plus bonuses from Ziko directly.

Cutting the middle out changes the numbers for everyone. Because Ziko takes no slice, riders pay about 10 percent less than they do on other ride hailing apps already operating in Syria, and drivers earn about 10 percent more than they do on those apps, for the same trip. We simply removed a cost that never needed to be there.

Ziko is not chasing margin at launch. It is backed directly by Innoveev, which owns it outright, so it does not need to turn a profit from day one the way a startup answering to outside investors would. That is a deliberate choice. I would rather treat drivers fairly and be patient with the economics than take a cut from people already working hard for very little.

Built for Syria as it actually is

Two early decisions get questioned a lot, and neither is a shortcut. First, Ziko launches nationwide from day one, not as a single-city pilot that expands later. Syria does not need another product that proves itself in the capital and forgets the rest of the country. Aleppo, Homs, Latakia, Deir ez-Zor and everywhere between face the same transport problems as Damascus, and that deserves a nationwide answer from the start.

Second, Ziko is cash only at launch. I know how that sounds next to apps elsewhere built entirely around saved cards. But Syria's currency situation is unstable, card infrastructure is limited and inconsistent, and cash is simply how people pay for a ride right now. Building card payments first would mean building for a Syria that does not exist yet. Cash first is the honest choice, not the easy one.

None of this is new to Syrians, and that is the point. For years the backbone of getting around any Syrian city has been the servees, shared taxis and microbuses running fixed routes, picking up whoever waves them down. It works because it is cheap, familiar and everywhere. Ziko is not trying to replace that system, only to upgrade it: the same shared transport, with an app that lets you book a private car or a shared van, see where your ride is, and know the driver has been checked out. Our drivers at launch mix people already driving taxis or servees informally with new drivers who have never driven for hire.

Safety is not an afterthought

Every driver on Ziko completes full KYC identity verification before taking a single trip, and riders can track their trip live in the app from the start. I want first-time users, and people naturally cautious about anything new, to feel the basics are handled properly.

I have built other Syria-first products before this one. Dealio is live today as the country's first AI-powered marketplace. We designed and built WeSyria, a government platform, and gave it to the Homs governorate as a gift because that moment called for it. Ziko is different. It is ours, fully owned and run by Innoveev, and it exists because I got tired of watching a fair system get built elsewhere while Syrian drivers and riders got the worst version of it.

Ziko launches in the fourth quarter of 2026, across the whole country. I will not pretend to know what happens after that. But I will say this quietly, because it is true: we are already studying whether an idea like this could make sense beyond Syria one day. Nothing is decided. For now, Syria is the whole focus, and it deserves to be.