When asked what had been on his mind the night before, Digikala co-founder Hamid Mohammadi didn’t begin with business. He mentioned his newborn son—his second child—and the way fatherhood had reshaped his daily life. But almost immediately, his thoughts shifted to the transformation of Digikala, the company he and his brother Saeed founded seventeen years ago and scaled into Iran’s largest e-commerce platform.
Recently, the brothers stepped down from running the core marketplace and restructured the organization into Digikala Group, a portfolio overseeing fintech, martech, social commerce, and new e-commerce models. A new CEO now leads the main business, while Hamid and Saeed focus on mentoring teams, guiding long-term strategy, and supporting the group’s rapidly expanding ventures. For Hamid, it reflects a shift from direct execution to stewardship.
He credits fatherhood for influencing this evolution. Becoming a parent, he says, turns decisions into long-term, multidimensional calculations. Trade-offs become inevitable, absolutes disappear, and maintaining balance becomes essential. The perspective is similar to that of a founder who has survived years of volatility, growth, and crises. It has pushed him to think not in quarters, but in decades.
Hamid argues that outsiders fundamentally misunderstand Iran’s tech ecosystem. Despite sanctions, the country has a young, highly technical population, with engineering talent comparable to global hubs. Between 2014 and 2016, dozens of startup events, accelerators, and venture programs emerged across the country. Even after sanctions returned and foreign investment evaporated, innovation accelerated.
Digikala is a prime example. Because Iran lacked the infrastructure common in Western markets—third-party logistics networks, consumer credit systems, and payment rails—Digikala had to build everything internally. Today, it operates a national logistics system that delivers over 95% of orders directly, a consumer credit platform powering roughly a quarter of its GMV, and custom scoring models created in a country with no credit bureaus. This internal reinvention produced a level of technical sophistication that many former Digikala engineers—now working in Europe—describe as more intense and demanding than their roles at global tech companies.
Still, Iran faces challenges. Top engineers often leave for Europe, where salaries are drastically higher. Foreign capital remains scarce; total investment in Iranian startups over two decades is less than a single late-stage round in Turkey or Dubai. Yet Hamid believes the fundamentals are strong enough that even partial sanctions relief could unlock a “mini-China”—a 90-million-person domestic market with deeply rooted technical capacity.
He speaks of his brother Saeed with admiration, describing his relentless obsession with quality as a core ingredient of Digikala’s culture. On the question of legacy, Hamid avoids grandiosity. He wants to be remembered as someone who improved shopping in Iran and made it easier for small sellers to reach a national audience. Before Digikala, product choice and pricing varied wildly between cities; today, a small workshop anywhere in Iran can sell to the entire country.
As the conversation ended, Hamid extended an invitation to visit Iran, meet the teams, and see Digikala’s operations firsthand. It reflects the same grounded, human tone that threads through his story: a founder who built a national tech institution while remaining deeply connected to the people and place that shaped it.
