Sovereignty over convenience.
Korea, China, Russia, India — every region with a strong identity built its own social fabric. The Middle East kept using platforms designed in San Francisco. We're finishing what should have been built a decade ago.
About ChaiTalk
We didn't wait. We started building.
ChaiTalk is a social network made for the Middle East, in the Middle East, by someone who grew up there and still misses the way evenings really sound. This is the founder's note.
Our mission
Free our region from depending on platforms that were never built for us.
Korea has KakaoTalk. China has WeChat. Russia has VK. India has many. The Middle East scrolls through feeds, posts, and timelines designed somewhere else, in a culture that isn't ours. ChaiTalk is the simplest, most stubborn answer to that: our own social network, in our language, with our defaults, owned in the region.
Our vision
A region with its own social fabric.
200M+
people online across MENA
22
countries we can serve in one language
0
social platforms built in the region for the region
1
starting now: ChaiTalk
What we stand for
Four things we don't compromise on.
Arabic is not a feature flag.
Most apps treat Arabic as a translation pass and an RTL toggle. We treat it as a first-class language: real typography, real layout, real cultural defaults — from day one of the codebase.
Voice, not text.
Our culture is oral before it is written. ChaiTalk puts the microphone on the timeline. You hold to record, and your friends hear you. That isn't a 1.2 feature — it's the killer one.
No surveillance economy.
We aren't for sale. The business model is alignment: pay a tiny amount when you can, see ads only if you opt in, and own your data. Nothing about your timeline gets shipped to a quarterly review somewhere else.
Story so far
The slow road, year by year.
2018
Moved to Korea
Yapoey left Egypt for Seoul. Watching Koreans use KakaoTalk while everyone back home was on platforms built somewhere else planted the idea.
2022
First mockups
Late-night sketches of a feed that finally felt like home. Arabic-first. Voice-first. Region-first.
2025
Backend live
Auth, timeline, stories, follow, S3 — running on a single box in Seoul. Nine PRs merged in one weekend.
2026 · MVP
Stories ship
Closed pilot with ~500 friends across Egypt and the Gulf. EN + AR from day one. Voice on the timeline arrives in v1.1.
2026 · v1.1
Voice + chat
Recording comments go live. 1-to-1 and group chat. The thing nobody else has bothered to build for our region the way we actually use it.
The founder
Yapoey · yapoey-bit
I came to Korea in 2018 and watched a country with 50 million people support its own social network instead of renting one. I never stopped thinking about what we deserve at home. ChaiTalk is the first real answer I've been able to ship. If you want to help — invest, build, or just spread the word — the door is wide open.