Hypeo AI: How a $600k loss led Meriam Bessa to build an AI Influencer platform

For Meriam Bessa, co-founder and CEO of Hypeo AI, the path to building an AI-powered influencer platform began with a crushing blow in early 2023. Her digital marketing agency, L’Atelier Digital, lost its biggest client, a $600,000 annual influencer marketing contract with L’Oreal, her former employer.

The reason? A single human error exposed the fragility of manual campaign management.

“One of my employees forgot to tell an influencer to post a story,” Bessa told Technext. “She was managing 50 influencers on an Excel sheet, and all communication with the brand and the influencers was done through WhatsApp. That’s why she forgot.”

The contract loss forced Bessa to lay off 43% of her employees at L’Atelier Digital, one of Morocco’s most established digital marketing agencies with 30 staff members. But it was a phone call from L’Oreal’s division director that would ultimately change everything.

“She told me, ‘You are a businesswoman. You’ve lost a client; you’ll win others. It’s not as if you had fourth-stage cancer,” Bessa remembers. “It was a hard thing to hear, but it motivated me. The whole market was saying my company would go bankrupt.”

From corporate executive to startup founder

Bessa’s entrepreneurial journey began long before the L’Oreal crisis. After studying in Paris, she made the conscious decision to return to Morocco at age 22, despite many friends staying in France.

“I felt I had to be part of my country’s development,” she explains. “For me, it’s very important to give back to my country.”

She spent a few years at multinational corporations, including L’Oreal, Unilever, and Haven, but felt constrained by the bureaucracy. “Working in large corporations made me feel like a machine,” she says. “Between the day you decide to do something and the day it’s done, it could be one or two years.”

In 2011, at 27, she joined a startup building Morocco’s first French-language online newspaper in partnership with Le Figaro. Despite building the entire operation from scratch – website development, team recruitment, partnership management, and sales – the founder dismissed her once the venture was established.

“He said, ‘Now I don’t need you anymore,'” Bessa recalls. That betrayal led her to launch L’Atelier Digital, which became one of Morocco’s leading digital marketing agencies, with L’Oreal as its crown jewel client.

The birth of Africa’s first AI influencer

After losing the L’Oreal contract, Bessa spent seven months in what she describes as isolation, working on a radical solution. She created Kenza AI, the first AI influencer in Morocco, Africa, and the Arab world.

“I realised I was doing the same thing as before, just with AI instead of humans. The core problem was still not solved; we were still working manually,” she explains. The eureka moment came when she recognised the need to build a product, not just offer services.

Kenza AI’s success was immediate and global. In July 2024, she won the Miss AI prize for the best AI influencer worldwide, amassing over 200,000 followers. Ironically, L’Oreal then approached Hypeo AI to collaborate with their AI influencers.

The startup, which can launch influencer campaigns in under 15 minutes using AI-powered matching and automation, plans to use the investment to expand platform features, onboard more creators and brands, and build its B2C AI coaching product.

It recently secured funding from Renew Capital, Digital Africa, and Madica Ventures.

The formation of Hypeo AI’s founding team reads like startup folklore. At the One Billion Followers Summit in Dubai, Bessa met Salah Eddine Mimouni (Saladin), who was building a complementary platform focused on data analytics while she worked on AI and process automation.

“He was working on the data side, and I was working on the AI and process side,” Bessa explains. “To finish, I needed the data, and he needed the AI and the process. So we decided to merge our platforms.”

The third co-founder, Oussama Sekkat, joined through an even more remarkable coincidence. While attending a Columbia University master’s program in June 2024, Bessa randomly encountered a childhood friend she hadn’t seen in 20 years at the airport, a senior software engineer at Meta.

“I told him I needed him to join us, that he had to come back to Morocco,” she says. He joined the team in December 2024.

Hypeo AI’s platform addresses the core inefficiencies that cost Bessa the L’Oreal contract. Instead of manual spreadsheet management and WhatsApp coordination, the platform uses AI agents to create campaign briefs, recommend influencer types, and match brands with creators using accuracy scores.

“When you launch a campaign manually, you spend hours on platforms looking for the right influencers,” Bessa explains. “We facilitate everything.”

The platform handles the entire workflow: AI script generation, content approval workflows, and real-time dashboards with KPIs and ROI tracking. For smaller businesses, a marketplace allows influencers to browse and apply for campaigns directly.

The company operates on a multi-subscription model with 5-15% commission fees, targeting transparency in an industry often criticised for opacity.

Riding the global influencer boom

Hypeo AI’s timing aligns with explosive growth in influencer marketing. According to their data, social media became the world’s largest advertising channel in 2024, with global ad spend reaching $247 billion and projected to hit $267 billion by the end of 2025.

“Our region has no shortage of talent. What’s been missing is smart infrastructure,” Bessa notes.

Currently in beta with 500 influencers and 18 brand partners, Hypeo AI plans to expand from Morocco to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, eventually reaching West and East African markets, including Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast.

Beyond platform automation, Hypeo AI is betting big on virtual creators. The company has developed 13 AI characters, including Nigerian personas, though funding constraints have limited their promotion compared to Kenza AI’s success.

“I believe that in a few years, AI influencers will be as strong as human influencers, especially for brands that need something very specific that a human cannot provide,” Bessa predicts.

The company is also developing a B2C AI-powered coaching companion for wellness and lifestyle users, diversifying beyond B2B influencer marketing.

The multi-investor backing reflects growing confidence in African tech startups addressing local market inefficiencies with AI-powered solutions. Renew Capital operates across 13 African countries, while Digital Africa and Madica Ventures bring additional expertise in scaling African tech ventures.

“Hypeo Ai is tackling a clear gap in how influencer marketing works in this region,” says Nihal Grii, Investment Ecosystem Development Manager at Renew Capital. “We see potential in their approach to simplifying the process for both brands and creators, and we’re glad to support their next stage of growth.”

As Bessa reflects on her journey from corporate executive to AI influencer pioneer, the L’Oreal contract loss appears less like a setback and more like a necessary catalyst.

“You have to build everything from scratch for each client, so you don’t scale,” she says of the agency model. “I realised we needed a product, not a service.”

With Renew Capital’s backing and a founding team combining marketing expertise, data analytics, and Meta-level engineering talent, Hypeo AI is positioned to transform how brands and creators collaborate across Africa and the Middle East, one 15-minute campaign at a time.