The following report draws from public court records, arbitration filings, and corporate communications to document the under-reported power struggle inside one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent tech companies. All claims, disputes, and outcomes referenced are attributed to official filings, statements, or primary sources.
Tracing HungerStation’s leadership fallout, from founder-led expansion to abrupt terminations and arbitration.
How Delivery Hero accused executives of misusing internal resources to build competing platforms.
Why a four-year legal battle ended with a $297M buyout and full ownership transfer to Delivery Hero.
How Al-Jassim returned with Ninja, a dark-store q-commerce startup now valued at $1.5B.
On April 16, 2019, employees at HungerStation, Saudi Arabia’s largest food delivery app, received an email from Delivery Hero’s co-founder and CEO, Niklas Östberg.
The subject was not routine. It informed staff that the entire executive leadership team of HungerStation; CEO and co-founder Ebrahim Al-Jassim, CTO Hossein Bukhamseen, CFO Sameh Hassan, and CPO Mishal Alshuwaikhat, had been terminated, effective immediately.
Östberg named Shabeb Al-Otaibi as interim manager and warned that any instructions issued by the former executives were not to be followed. “Should we identify any violations,” the email stated, “we will have to take corresponding legal action.”
No formal reason was provided in that initial communication. But within days, the picture sharpened.
In a second internal email seen at the time by MENAbytes, Östberg confirmed that Delivery Hero was investigating three unauthorised applications: a grocery delivery platform, an on-demand delivery service, and a last-mile logistics app. All three, according to Östberg, may have been “developed as part of HungerStation,” though further internal verification was ongoing.
Employees were instructed to immediately halt any further development of these apps – except, Östberg clarified, the last-mile logistics application, which was still operationally necessary to support HungerStation deliveries.
What emerged over the following months, and years, was a complex legal dispute that combined a founder exit, allegations of internal IP misuse, a confidential arbitration process, and multiple cross-border court filings.
Central to it all was Pace, a last-mile delivery startup also registered as Fast Choice LLC, which Delivery Hero believed had been built using HungerStation infrastructure while Al-Jassim and his team were still in charge…
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